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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29152473">The Haunting of Blackwood House</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/judesstfrancis/pseuds/acetheticallyy'>acetheticallyy (judesstfrancis)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>ghouls and other things that haunt us [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Asexual Character, Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), Child Neglect, Childhood Trauma, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-02</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 09:28:20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>30,065</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29152473</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/judesstfrancis/pseuds/acetheticallyy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>To Do List:<br/>1. Find out what’s haunting Martin<br/>2. Plan accordingly<br/>3. (Ongoing) make sure Martin never feels alone</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Gerard Keay &amp; Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>ghouls and other things that haunt us [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2248815</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>245</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>390</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Night 0, Day 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>hi guys! I've had the idea for this fic since december of 2019 and now it's finally here, in february of 2021. amazing how the years start coming and they don't stop coming.</p><p>title lovingly borrowed from the real novel "the haunting of blackwood house" by darcy coates, which I have never read and has no influence on the plot of <em>this</em> story whatsoever, but it is nevertheless still the reason this fic exists. also the reason this fic exists: robin. thanks for always having the best advice and the most patience, I love u so so much &lt;3</p><p>this fic is fully complete and will update twice weekly on tuesdays and fridays until it is uploaded in full!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Martin had never thought of ghosts as something he, personally, would ever have to worry about. They were real, yes, and hauntings happened, <em>of course</em>, but it had never really been on his radar as something that would happen to <em>him</em>. Then the knocking started.</p><p>Ironically, the first time he hears the knocking he’s watching Ghostbusters. Why he’s watching Ghostbusters at three in the morning on a Wednesday is really nobody’s business. The important thing is the rhythmic pounding coming from the door downstairs in his kitchen.</p><p>
  <em>Knock. Knock. Knock.</em>
</p><p>And then a pause.</p><p>And then <em>knock. Knock. Knock</em>.</p><p>And a pause. And repeat.</p><p>The first trio of knocks makes him jump halfway out of his skin. He can tell, instinctively, that it’s not coming from his front door. It’s three in the morning, first off. And his front door is much heavier. This knocking sounds…<em>duller</em>. Like the door is less reinforced. Like there’s less wood surface area to knock on. Because of windows, maybe. Kind of like how the door in his kitchen would sound, if you knocked on it.</p><p>The door in his kitchen leads to his backyard.</p><p>It sounds like someone is <em>in his backyard</em>.</p><p>Martin holds very still, barely breathes, as he keeps listening. Ten minutes go by before he lets himself relax. He’s just about convinced himself it never happened when it starts up again. This time, it’s louder. He can tell which side of the house it’s coming from.</p><p>It’s definitely coming from the kitchen door.</p><p>The longer Martin sits, the louder it gets. Ten minutes between knocking becomes five minutes becomes two minutes becomes forty-five seconds.</p><p>Martin isn’t white. It’s important to note that. So he <em>knows </em>he shouldn’t go down there, but he also knows his chances with calling the police are probably worse. If there’s a murderer, or a demon, or <em>whatever</em> standing in his backyard banging on the door to his kitchen, he thinks he fancies dealing with them better than he does dealing with law enforcement. He grabs the boxcutter he keeps in the bedside drawer and starts walking down the stairs on shaking legs that threaten to give out every time the knocking grows louder in volume. He thinks it might be starting to shake the walls.</p><p>After a moment’s hesitation, he continues downwards. There’s a cross on the wall, leftover from his mother. Martin’s never put a lot of stock into Catholicism, formally divorced himself from the religion at a very young age, even, but he also never thought he’d be standing at the top of his stairs at three in the morning wondering if there was a demon in his backyard. So he can’t be too careful, he supposes. It makes him feel better, in any case.</p><p>It feels like the knocking gets louder the closer he gets to it. Which he supposes makes sense, but it doesn’t feel like the regular rise in volume that comes with getting closer to a noise. It’s like he can feel it in his chest. By the time he makes it into the kitchen, he feels like his skull is going to crack open with how loud it is.</p><p>Martin doesn’t see anyone through the windows on his back door. The knocking continues. He can see the door shaking with the force of it. It can’t be coming from anywhere. And yet it still does.</p><p>He spares a thought to open the door, to knock back, anything that might make it stop, but he finds that he doesn’t want to. It feels <em>wrong</em>, somehow, to get closer. There might not be any direct threat to him, there, but there surely isn’t anything good that can come from getting closer to whatever’s decided to show up and bang a steady rhythm into his back door for about two hours now. Again: he’s not white. If there isn’t a person out there, then there’s something that <em>isn’t</em> a person out there, and that’s not something he wants to deal with.</p><p>So he turns his back on it and ascends the stairs back up to his room and locks the door behind him like it’s going to stop absolutely anything from happening to him. The knocking doesn’t stop until the sun comes up, and when it does it doesn’t taper off or get quieter and quieter until it’s fully inaudible, it just stops.</p><p>
  <em>Knock. Knock. Knock.</em>
</p><p>And then a pause.</p><p>And then <em>knock. Knock. Knock</em>.</p><p>And a pause. And <em>knock</em>. <em>Knock</em>.</p><p>Silence.</p><p>No third knock. The walls stop shaking. His head stops pounding. He gives it another hour or two before he goes downstairs to check. Everything feels fine. It’s like nothing ever happened.</p><p>Except Martin <em>knows </em>it happened, and he knows he never fell asleep, and he still has the imprint of the casing of his boxcutter pressed into his palm from how hard he’d been clutching it all night, a small comfort that he knows wouldn’t have amounted to anything if whatever was out there had gotten in.</p><p>Still, he tries to go about his business. He turns the kettle on and gets the milk out of the fridge and acts like it’s just a normal Wednesday. Like he’s just pouring himself tea after a good night’s sleep and he’s going to go sit out on the back porch like always and enjoy the morning sun before it disappears behind the afternoon fog.</p><p>Martin finds he doesn’t quite want to sit on the back porch this morning. Instead, he hops up on the counter next to the kettle and enjoys the view from the window over the sink.</p><p>He opens his phone to take his mind off things. After a few minutes of blindly liking photos on his Instagram, he comes across a local ad for a group of paranormal investigators. It’s stupid, but he decides to get in contact. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe he was <em>hallucinating</em>, but he’d like to know. And as luck would have it, they have time to come by later in the day to give the house an initial look over. He’s never been so happy to live in a dystopian surveillance state that records every noise you’ve ever made.</p><p>*</p><p>Four of them arrive at his house a couple hours later. It’s a little strange. They’d only mentioned three of them were coming, and their site had only featured three of them as well—a tall Korean man with a wide smile, a Black woman with thick glasses and even thicker lenses, and a Persian man with a cane in his hand and greying hair that hangs well past his shoulders.</p><p>Those three were standing on his porch currently, instantly recognizable. The fourth one with them, a pale man with poorly dyed jet-black hair, was not only unfamiliar but looked like he was horribly out of place. The other three, the ones he’d seen on the website, were all dressed about as professionally as you would expect from a group of people who made house calls, even if those house calls were related to alleged hauntings. This guy, though. The faded, well-worn tank top and ripped jeans made him look more like he was about to head off to a local concert held in someone’s basement.</p><p>But he’s standing close to the group, looking like he belongs there, and Martin isn’t about to be rude by asking questions. And it wasn’t like Martin was really in the position to judge someone for how they dressed, anyway, when he had literally hired strangers from an Instagram ad to make sure his house didn’t have any demons in it. All things considered, a goth tagging along on a ghost hunt isn’t really the strangest thing that could happen to him.</p><p>The three from the ad introduce themselves as Tim, Sasha, and Jon. The fourth doesn’t mention a name. In fact, he doesn’t talk at all except for a quiet, “I’ll have a look around,” as he and Jon trail behind the other two on their way inside Martin’s home.</p><p>“Let me know if you see anything,” Jon whispers before they catch up with the other two, and that’s that. The pale man with the patchy dye job doesn’t say a single word after that.</p><p>Not even as Martin begins to explain what happened the night before. He just sticks to the background, not reacting beyond raising an eyebrow here and there or tapping his thin fingers on Jon’s arm in some sort of nonsensical rhythm that Jon only ever responds to with a barely-there dip of his head.</p><p>“It started about three this morning,” Martin says, leading the four of them into his kitchen. “It’s never happened before, and I almost thought there was someone here? But it…<em>felt </em>wrong, so I went to check and then…there was no one there. And it just kept going, all night, until the sun came up. That’s when I contacted you all.”</p><p>“It was this door?” the woman—Sasha—asks as she walks towards it.</p><p>Martin gestures in the door’s direction as he gives the affirmative, knocking into the fruit basket hanging from a beam in the ceiling. The basket swings and hits the fan above the stove three distinct times. <em>Knock. Knock. Knock</em>.</p><p>Jon raises an unimpressed eyebrow in his direction. “You said it was three knocks?”</p><p>“No, I—I mean <em>yes</em>, I suppose it did sound a bit like that, but I know the difference between something <em>knocking</em> and my own fruit basket being displaced, thank you,” Martin says, feeling a little offended. “It’s just me in here, and <em>I </em>certainly didn’t run into it at three in the morning and scare the hell out of myself.”</p><p>“Don’t mind him,” Tim says, “he always does this.” The eye-roll he gives is fond, and the arm slung around Jon’s shoulders is so familiar that Martin finds himself growing a little fond, too, despite the insinuation that he must be causing his own haunting. “Have to rule everything out first, you know, make sure it isn’t something you can fix easily like loose pipes or something. Nothing against you, just how it is.”</p><p>The explanation is followed up with a flick to Jon’s ear, and he shrugs off the arm around his shoulders. If Martin hadn’t spent most of his life teaching himself to tune in to and analyze people's expressions, he may not have noticed it, but the slight quirk of Jon’s lips as he grumbles his annoyance at Tim betrays what he’s really feeling. It’s so small, but it softens him considerably.</p><p>Tim looks like he notices as well, sidestepping the elbow Jon aims into his side with a laugh and coming back in to put a gentle hand over his shoulder when he notices the way Jon leans a bit more heavily into the cane in his hand, slightly unbalanced after his display.</p><p>The gesture makes the back of Martin’s neck itch, a little.</p><p>It’s stupid. He doesn’t know <em>why</em>. It’s a sweet gesture, familiar. Unobtrusive enough that if Martin weren’t so prone to hyper-focus on the actions of others, he wouldn’t have even noticed. It doesn’t <em>bother</em> him, that’s not it. It’s also none of his business. But he feels like someone’s just dropped an ice cube down the back of his shirt and—</p><p>He turns around on reflex. The man with the long, dyed-black hair and the strange tattoos stands in the back corner of Martin’s kitchen, far away from everyone else. Martin had forgotten he was here.</p><p>Martin doesn’t think he’s seen him interact with any of them since he started showing them all around the house.  The only one of them he’s actually seen the man talk to or really <em>acknowledge</em> at all, actually, was Jon, and as soon as the pair of them had gotten closer to the rest of them, the man had begun to hang back farther. To the point where, just minutes into explaining the previous night’s events, Martin had forgotten all about his presence.</p><p>The man appears to be checking out the kitchen now, keeping stationary in the corner and squinting around the room. He seems to be looking for something. Martin wonders what he’s looking <em>for</em>. There can’t be anything relevant hidden between the pots and pans hanging over his kitchen counter.</p><p>There’s a look of frustration that comes up on the man’s face, then. He flexes one hand and the tattoos over his knuckles give the distinct, eerie impression that they’re winking at him. Martin doesn’t quite have time to turn away before the man notices that he’s staring.</p><p>He startles, a little. The man does, not Martin. Like he wasn’t expecting him to be there, maybe, which…well it’s Martin’s house, but yeah, maybe he shouldn’t be staring at someone when he’s supposed to be showing the very kind ghost hunters around his home so they can get rid of whatever wants to knock on his doors all night. So perhaps it’s his fault.</p><p>Martin dips his head and gives a brief smile, turning back to the other three before he’s questioned about staring.</p><p>There’s not much to show them all beyond the kitchen, really. Martin shows them the staircase to the second floor, mentions that it felt like the walls there were shaking as the knocking was happening, but that’s about it. They give the walls and the door a few cursory knocks, testing. Testing what, Martin doesn’t know, but he figures they know better than he does. Through it all, the tattooed man hangs back a few feet behind them all and squints. Sometimes it’s at empty corners of the room, sometimes it’s at Martin. Martin’s not sure which one unnerves him more.</p><p>They all end up in Martin’s living room, deliberating. Martin insists on putting a kettle on. Jon tries to brush off the offer, whether out of politeness or genuine disinterest Martin isn’t sure, but Tim and Sasha seem agreeable enough and Jon ends up smiling his thanks for the offer as Martin gets up to put everything together. It’s a nice smile, he supposes, if a little more grimace-y than he thinks the innocent offer of a cup of tea deserves.</p><p>The strange man with the tattoos hadn’t answered and Martin waffles a bit over whether or not he should bring him one anyway before he decides on just brewing enough for four. It’ll be there if the man wants it, and if he doesn’t then Martin can just pretend that he’d made that cup for himself. No big deal. He’s not sure why, but he doesn’t want to just go back out and ask him directly. Something about the man’s presence unnerves him, not in a wholly terrible way, but it unnerves him just the same. He supposes it’s a little rude. It’s not the tattoos, it’s not the hair—it’s not even the outfit, even if that had taken him by surprise initially. Martin thinks the man looks rather cool, actually, all put together like that. It’s just <em>something</em>. In any case, Martin is a good host and they’re all four doing him a favor, so he’s not going to make it weird.</p><p>When he gets back to the living room, tea balanced on a tray in his hands, Sasha is speaking.</p><p>“Yes, I know what <em>you </em>think, Jon, you never want to believe it’s real, but there’s nothing that could explain it away that makes sense with what he told us, and it’s not going to hurt to stick around and find out.”</p><p>Jon looks like he might be ready to argue further, but the man with the tattoos hurriedly taps a finger against the ball of his shoulder, and Jon hesitates. “Fine. You’re right.”</p><p>“Oh did <em>Jon </em>finally admit that someone knew better than him?”</p><p>“Sasha knows better than me plenty, Tim, I just don’t concede that you’re right often because you hardly ever are.”</p><p>“Hey!”</p><p>Jon chuckles at the indignance in Tim’s voice, a soft, deep sound that makes something flutter just beneath Martin’s ribcage.</p><p>Okay, <em>no</em>. He’s not doing that. These are ghost hunters that he is <em>paying</em> to provide him a service. He doesn’t care <em>how </em>cute he thinks Jon’s laugh is, or how cute his smile is, or how cute <em>he </em>is, in general really, because thinking about someone like that when you’re literally paying them is, quite frankly, weird and creepy. Besides! The guy had accused him of haunting his own home—twice, it sounds like! He doesn’t <em>get </em>to be thought of like that.</p><p>Martin wills away the involuntary reaction and sets the tray down on the coffee table they’re all seated around. He notices that the pale man hasn’t taken a chair for himself, simply leans against the chair Jon is sat in with his arms crossed over the seatback. It’s not altogether odd, plenty of people feel weird claiming a chair for themselves in a stranger’s home, but the other three had clearly had no problem with it. And the man did look comfortable enough, it’s not like he was standing still as a statue in the middle of the room with his arms plastered to his sides or anything, but…it just struck Martin as a little weird. He chalks it up to lingering feelings of unease from the night before.</p><p>The three that are seated happily grab at a cup as Martin claims a seat as his own, but the man standing just behind Jon makes no move to do the same. When he still doesn’t, even as the other three have taken a few cursory sips and smiled (Sasha) or cursed their way through very exaggerated praise for what they deemed to be the best cup of tea that’s ever existed (Tim) or given a very soft and surprisingly gentle thank you (Jon), Martin frowns. When he notices that Martin hasn’t taken it for himself, the man narrows his eyes into a confused squint again, just like earlier. Like Martin is the Kobayashi Maru and he hasn’t quite figured out he’s not supposed to be able to win it yet.</p><p>Martin isn’t given a chance to say anything about it when Tim speaks up.</p><p>“So, Martin, we’ve decided on a plan for the next few days,” he says. “We don’t have anything with us today, because we just wanted to have a look around, but we think we’re going to come back tomorrow, if that’s alright with you, and get a few things set up so we can start monitoring everything and see what we’re really dealing with.”</p><p>“That’s great, actually,” Martin responds. “I didn’t really expect you all to be ready to do anything so fast, so. I mean I was thinking I might have to wait a bit, I don’t know how busy you are normally, so starting tomorrow is perfect. Is there, uh—is there anything you need me to do? For tonight?”</p><p>Sasha smiles warmly and takes another sip of her tea before speaking. “Nothing at all. We know you might not feel up to staying here by yourself after what you’ve experienced, so we won’t ask you to try and record anything on your own. That is what you’re paying us for, after all.”</p><p>Martin has nowhere else <em>to </em>stay, if he’s being honest, but Sasha doesn’t need to know about his quite frankly very sad social life, so he just nods his agreement.</p><p> “Great,” he says. “Thank you.”</p><p>Jon runs a finger around the rim of his cup a couple times before tapping the edge of a brightly lacquered fingernail decisively against the ceramic and draining the rest of its contents. “Well,” he says, “unless you have any questions, we’ll be seeing you tomorrow?”</p><p>It feels like a dismissal, but the way Tim rolls his eyes as he pushes his seat back to stand softens it some. “Jon’s not good with friendly silences,” he says in a stage whisper. “You’ll get used to him soon enough, though.”</p><p>The man with the tattoos flicks Jon in the back of the skull as he stands, and Jon manages to look properly chastised by the gesture. “Thank you again for the tea, Martin,” he says, sounding genuine. “It was lovely.”</p><p>Martin almost wants to laugh at the way Jon’s brow is pinched in the middle as he speaks, but he understands being uncomfortable and awkward around strangers, so he doesn’t. The man may have insinuated that Martin was a liar multiple times <em>in his own home</em>, but that didn’t mean Martin wanted to embarrass him. He seems nice, all things considered, and if the way he talks to his friends when he thinks no one is watching—all gentle ribbing and soft laughter—is any indication, then there’s probably more to him than just raising unamused eyebrows at people in kitchens and ending conversations in a way that makes it sound like he’d rather be talking to literally anyone else.</p><p>It’s not like calling tea lovely is an apology, and it’s not like Martin really thinks he needs one, but there was an intended, if awkward, warmth to it that brushed away the curt tone of his earlier words just the same.</p><p>After the four of them have left, Martin goes to clean up the coffee table. Three of the cups are empty, and one has been left to grow cold. Three out of four isn’t too bad, Martin thinks, even as the sight of the untouched cup makes the hair on the back of his neck start to prickle.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>as we all know, love is stored in the kitchen. funny then how that’s where the haunting starts huh?</p><p>see you all on friday (february 5th)!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Day 2, Night 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>hey everyone, welcome back! just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who left a comment on the first chapter. I'm really sorry I haven't responded to any of them individually, believe me when I say that it's absolutely killing me not to it's just that I know myself and I WILL give away spoilers if asked nicely.</p><p>so let me just say here: if you've said anything directly to me like that you like my writing style or you like the way a particular dynamic was written or you want me to have a good day or anything like that, thank u so so much and I hope u have a great day too! my day was made simply by reading your comments &lt;3</p><p>as for your speculations and theories.......well, let's see shall we? enjoy!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Martin doesn’t think he expected this much preparation to go into setting up for surveilling his house for <em>ghosts</em>, but his only interaction with anything even sort of resembling real ghost hunting up to this point had been the first three seasons of some American ghost hunting show he’d started bingeing on Netflix one night because he was bored, so. You know, what does he know?</p><p>“Do you, um—do you guys need help with anything?” Okay, yes, they’re providing him with a service, which he is paying for, and he knows nothing about cameras or microphones or electromagnetic fields <em>or </em>ghost hunting, but he still feels like kind of an idiot standing around in his kitchen while everyone else bustles around setting up equipment and looking generally competent.</p><p>Well. Almost everyone. The pale, goth-looking man is back again today, still no name given and wearing what looks to Martin like the same clothes as the day before. He keeps to the background, much like yesterday, and seems to have tasked himself with the very important job of once again staring confusedly at different aspects of his kitchen.</p><p>Maybe that is his real job. Maybe he’s a psychic or something, reads energies. Like a spiritual vibe check, or whatever. Martin’s not going to ask. It’s probably important, or else he wouldn’t be here.</p><p>Tim answers him first, sending a good-natured smirk in his direction as he rigs together something that looks altogether entirely too complicated for Martin to even begin to name. “Martin, no offense, but you’re sort of looking at everything like you think it’s going to eat you.”</p><p>Yeah, fair enough.</p><p>“Tim, be <em>nice</em>,” Sasha laughs from the other side of the room as she taps at a keyboard, presumably making sure everything is set up with a good connection. Or testing it to make sure it’s properly calibrated for ghost frequencies. Or whatever. “It’s fine, Martin, this is our job anyway. Just keep us company, you’ve been doing great at it so far.”</p><p>Martin’s never been called good company before. It doesn’t matter, it’s not the point, but it’s nice enough to make him feel like less of an ass for just standing around his kitchen when everyone else—<em>almost </em>everyone else—is busy. So he pulls himself onto the edge of his kitchen counter and decides his new job is to keep out of everyone’s way and simply provide general commentary when needed.</p><p>It was easy enough to keep up a nice conversation. They were a pretty personable group, or at least Tim and Sasha were. Tim has a habit of putting a hand on Martin’s shoulder or smacking teasingly at his arm with an easy familiarity that makes Martin feel like they’ve known each other for years instead of hours. Sasha asks him questions so easily and so genuinely that Martin doesn’t feel self-conscious at all when he gets to rambling on about the dog he had when he was eleven, or the pottery class he’d gotten really into a few years ago, when he still had the free time, or how he’s been considering going back to university again, part time, now that he has more time and his income is a little more flexible.</p><p>Martin doesn’t quite feel comfortable telling them all that the fact that he <em>does </em>have more time and a more flexible income now is that his mother died late last year. He still doesn’t like to talk about it, for a multitude of reasons, and the conversation as it is is much too calm and enjoyable for him to want to bring down the mood like that. Besides, as comfortable as he feels around them at the moment, they really have only known each other for a few hours. This isn’t something you dump on friends when you’ve only known them for a couple of <em>months</em>, let alone less than a day. Martin’s not big on trauma dumping, not unless it’s between the hours of noon and one thirty every other Saturday.</p><p>“So how did things go last night, Martin?” Sasha asks after a moment or two of jokes and regular conversation. “You ended up staying here, you said?”</p><p>Martin had sort of been hoping they wouldn’t ask that. He knew they <em>would</em>, but he wishes they wouldn’t. Because it’s kind of embarrassing, actually. That whole to do the night before and the rush home evaluation at the last minute and then. Well.</p><p>“It was sort of…calm actually?” He scrubs a hand across the back of his neck a little nervously, well aware of how warm his face is getting. “The knocking was still there but it wasn’t as…well I didn’t feel like the house was going to fall down like I did yesterday.”</p><p>Tim nods understandingly. Jon squints suspiciously. The man with the strange tattoos cocks his head to the side, looking more confused than anything else. Martin isn’t sure which reaction he should put the most stock in.</p><p>Sasha’s the only one who actually <em>says</em> anything. Martin could kiss her if he wasn’t so gay. And if that wouldn’t be incredibly creepy and wholly unwanted.</p><p>“That’s pretty common,” she says. “Well, actually, it usually doesn’t start out so violent in the first place. That was a little out of the blue. But it’s common enough for the activity to relax a little after the first day. Creating a false sense of security, sort of.”</p><p>It’s not…<em>reassuring</em> exactly, the fact that the ghosts in his home are apparently trying to catch him off guard so they can kill him worse at a later date, but it at least makes him feel less like he’s making everything up. He’s not going to lie, when he had gone to bed last night and the knocking was no more than a timid little triplet, almost ignorable except for the fact that Martin was still more than a little on edge, he’d thought that maybe it was all in his head. Maybe it was explainable, maybe he called ghost hunters for nothing, maybe they’d come back and laugh in his face and call him insane and collect their money and leave.</p><p>So it’s nice to know that what’s happening to his home is apparently normal. Or as normal as this sort of thing gets. Minus the irregularities that Sasha pointed out.</p><p>Jon is still squinting at him a little suspiciously from where he’s leaning against a wall, tapping an irregular rhythm on the tile of his kitchen with the end of his cane. It makes Martin feel like he’s about to crawl out of his skin. He’d <em>thought </em>they had gotten over their initial awkwardness yesterday. It had been laughed off, Jon had apologized for being a little brisk, and Martin thought they were getting somewhere, or at least as close to somewhere as two people who didn’t know each other and existed solely in a customer/service provider space could get. Somewhere close to civil, at least.</p><p>Martin hadn’t been expecting companionable, not like Tim and Sasha, but he had expected maybe a smile or two. A polite hello. At the very least, he had expected Jon to not continue looking at him like he’d made it all up. <em>Especially</em> when Tim and Sasha had already confirmed that it was likely he wasn’t making it all up, because this is all apparently <em>normal</em>. Martin thinks Jon should know that, considering he was listed as the one who put the group together on their website.</p><p>But maybe that’s his thing. Maybe that’s just how he looks. How he <em>is</em>. Whatever. At the very least, though, he’s not nearly as weird as the lanky white man that never talks and spends the entire time hanging out in the background staring at the dark corners of his kitchen and clenching his jaw like he’s come across an old puzzle that’s been frustrating him for longer than he’d like to admit, only ever talking to Jon in hushed whispers far away from the rest of them and erratic taps on the inside of his forearm.</p><p>Martin still isn’t sure how that works, the tapping. Jon seems to, although he never relays the meaning, but then again maybe it’s none of Martin’s business.</p><p>Then again, they are in his home and he’d kind of like to know what’s going on.</p><p>Then again, there’s no way Martin is going to ask, because Jon still doesn’t look like he believes him and the skinny white dude still kind of scares him a little bit, so. Maybe he’ll ask later.</p><p>Or maybe never! Probably never. It’s more likely that he’s the only one that notices, to be honest. It’s only really noticeable if you look for it, and Martin looks closer than most for reasons he doesn’t care to disclose. So it would probably be a breach of privacy. It’s probably something he shouldn’t pry into.</p><p>He’s never going to mention it, ever.</p><p>“Well, guys, looks like we’re all set up,” Tim says. “Martin, Jon will come back before dark to stay with you overnight, but until then there’s not much else for us to do without seeing anything.”</p><p>Martin’s brain kind of stutters over the fact that <em>Jon’s</em> the one that’s going to be staying. The thing is he’d sort of figured already, based on the few shows he’d watched on television, that all of them would stay, but if he had to pick which <em>one</em> of them would most readily volunteer for the position he wouldn’t have chosen Jon. All things considered, Martin probably would’ve guessed the tall white guy that hides in the corners of his kitchen and doesn’t say anything at all, ever, despite the fact that Martin knows he <em>can</em>, would have offered to take the overnight shift before Jon.</p><p>He figures Tim <em>must</em> be joking. He doesn’t want to say that, though, because that would be rude, so he settles for acting like he hadn’t be paying attention. “Hmm?” he asks.</p><p>Tim flashes him a smile that says he sees right through him. “Jon always does the overnight. He’s shit with technology and we’re shit with actually observing, so. It works out.”</p><p>“<em>You’re </em>shit at actually observing,” Sasha corrects. “We just have more equipment than one person can handle on their own, and <em>you </em>need <em>me </em>to help you look through all the footage we collect because you fall asleep if you have to do it by yourself.”</p><p>“I want to argue with that,” Tim says, “but I know I can’t.”</p><p>There’s some good-natured ribbing that breaks off after that. Jon seems to take great relish in taking Sasha’s side and ganging up on Tim. If Martin had to hazard a guess, Tim looks like he probably enjoys it just as much.</p><p>It’s not something Martin focuses on, though. He’s still sort of trying to figure out how he’s going to survive apparently <em>multiple nights</em> alone with someone who both A: still seems to think he’s a liar, and B: doesn’t seem to want to say more than five words to him at a time. It’s going to be great.</p><p>*</p><p>Martin has no idea how to exist in his too-large home with no one but a ghost hunter he’s known for a sum total of five hours for company. A ghost hunter he’s known for a sum total of five hours that apparently has some weird unknown grudge against him for whatever reason. Or one that, at the very least, thinks he’s a liar. Martin barely knows how to exist in his too-large home on his <em>own</em>, having Jon there is, well…it feels pretty near impossible, actually.</p><p>“Do you, um…do you need anything?” Martin asks a little awkwardly. “Water, or…?”</p><p>He wants to smack himself. In front of him, Jon is just lifting a metal water bottle away from his lips, eyebrow raised and lips pursed as he swallows.</p><p>“Right,” Martin says. “Um…anything? Else, though?”</p><p>Jon shakes his head, unscrewing the water bottle lid that he’d just screwed back on and taking another drink. It strikes Martin as something of a nervous gesture—like perhaps he wasn’t the only one who had no idea how to act in this situation. Jon fidgets a little where he stands, shifting his weight from foot to foot before shooting out a hand to catch the cane that is now falling to the floor, displaced by all the nervous fidgeting.</p><p>“Oh!” At Martin’s sudden shout, Jon shrinks back a little. His eyes go wide again, this time less out of confusion and more out of being genuinely startled. “Sorry, sorry,” Martin backtracks. “I just, um—you can sit? If you want? The, uh—I don’t know if you plan on sleeping or anything, I’m not sure how these things work, but I assume you want to be close to the equipment? And the—the couch is clear, so…you’re free to sit, or-or lay down, or anything. If you want. The kitchen is just through the doorway.” He points as if the spot they’re standing in doesn’t have a perfect view of his stove in the other room.</p><p>An almost imperceptible sparkle lights up Jon’s eyes then, as he carefully lowers himself onto the couch. Martin could almost say he looks amused. “Yes, thank you, Martin,” Jon says.</p><p>“Right.”</p><p>Martin just stands there for a minute. It’s been so long since he’s had any company at all that he’s more than a little bit rusty on his hospitality skills. Jon shrinks back into the couch cushions, twisting open the cap of his water bottle and lifting it to his lips to take a sip. Once the cap is screwed back on tight, he moves to set it on the floor in front of the couch, notices Martin is still staring, and does it again. Definitely a nervous gesture.</p><p>Okay. Truth be told, he doesn’t really <em>need </em>to be here. There’s not much he can offer, investigation-wise, and he’s never really been great at keeping up conversation with people who don’t seem to want anything to do with him, besides.</p><p>Although, that’s not quite fair, <em>that </em>might be Martin projecting. It’s not like Jon <em>hates </em>him, probably, he just seems to think everything that comes out of Martin’s mouth is a lie. Which is fine, really, if someone had told Martin they heard strange, knocking triplets at their back door at three in the morning with no apparent source in sight, never mind that they had been up that late watching cheesy ghost movies from the eighties, he’d probably be a little skeptical himself; might say <em>they </em>were the ones projecting. Martin does think that maybe the professional ghost hunter in this situation should be a little more <em>believing </em>of his clients, but hey, what does he know about it.</p><p>Either way, Jon looks uncomfortable and Jon is a <em>guest </em>and Martin is starting to become more than a little uncomfortable himself, standing around doing nothing while not even trying to look like he isn’t staring, so.</p><p>“Um, I’ll leave you to it, then,” he says. “Help yourself to anything; if you need me, I’ll be upstairs.” And with that, he flees.</p><p>At the top of the stairs, Martin runs into the strange white man with all the weird eye tattoos. Strange—Martin hadn’t seen him come in with Jon earlier. But maybe he’d come in later, and Martin hadn’t noticed, or Jon had just now let him in, and…somehow, he beat Martin upstairs? There’s an explanation for it, he’s sure.</p><p>“Oh, you’re here,” Martin says, cringing when he realizes how rude it might come off. “I mean, I—I didn’t know you would be staying, too. I, uh—did <em>you </em>need anything?”</p><p>Martin’s beginning to think the man’s default facial expression is a confused squint. The man leans slowly against the wall, not bothering to stay clear of the picture frames lining the hallway. Martin keeps a straight face, electing to ignore it. <em>These are guests, Martin. They’re here to help. You can’t yell at them.</em></p><p>“I’m fine,” the man says, still squinting. “I always stay with Jon, sorry he forgot to tell you. He gets a little…weird about these things, I guess.” Relaxed and unaffected as he looks, the explanation comes out a little halting. Even so, Martin gets the feeling he’s supposed to be charmed—and he might be, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s pretty sure he knows exactly what all this is really about.</p><p>“He doesn’t exactly trust me, does he?”</p><p>The man’s eyebrows quirk upward for a second before his expression settles. Martin feels a little insulted—did they really think he couldn’t tell what Jon obviously thought of him and his house? Before he can argue, though, the man answers. “It’s not your fault,” he says. This time, his response is a lot more forthcoming. “He just…look, don’t tell him I said anything, but he’s had a rough go of it, before. With the hauntings. He doesn’t <em>want </em>to believe anything is happening, because he doesn’t want to believe that what happened to him is happening to anyone else. It looks like he’s annoyed with you, but he isn’t—he’s just <em>hoping </em>you’re lying. It can be a little aggressive, but he does mean well.”</p><p>“Well that is…better, I guess,” Martin relents. “Suppose I can’t really get upset about it if he only <em>wants </em>me to be lying.”</p><p>This time, the man smiles. It’s a small thing, just a minor quirk of the lips, but it takes what looks like years of exhaustion off the man’s face and it feels genuine enough to put Martin at ease with him for once. “He really is nice. Doesn’t hate anyone, really, just—he has an odd way of showing how he cares, sometimes.”</p><p>“Right, well, thank you, um—sorry I don’t think I actually caught a name?”</p><p>The man straightens up from where he’s be leaning against the wall. He tilts his head to the side for a moment, like he’s thinking about something. Martin spares a thought for the pictures lining the wall behind him, not a single one shifted out of place. “Gerry,” the man answers. “You can call me Gerry.”</p><p>“Thanks, Gerry,” Martin says. “I’ll let you get on, I suppose. Um—bathroom’s at the end of the hall, if you need it, and I’m sure you remember where the kitchen is. Help yourself to anything.”</p><p>Gerry’s smile then is wider than the last, showing teeth. If Martin didn’t know any better, he’d say he was being made fun of, but the smirk itself doesn’t feel mean-spirited—more like he’s simply remembered a particularly funny joke that he can’t help but laugh at. “Sure thing. I’ll let you know if we need you, but you should be fine going through your routine like normal.”</p><p>He goes back to studying the corners of the hallway before Martin can respond, and Martin takes that as his cue to leave them to their work. After the week he’s been having, he figured he’d be so pent up on restless energy that he wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, staying up until the wee hours of the morning just waiting for something to go wrong. As it is, he’s so exhausted from the past couple of days that he falls asleep without even noticing that the knocks have stopped.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>hey there gerry! nice to be properly introduced.</p><p>see u all back here on tuesday (february 9th)!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Day 3, Night 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>welcome back everyone, happy tuesday!</p><p>thanks again for all your wonderful comments on the previous chapter! it really makes my day knowing u guys are having such a good time with this already, and I love love love reading all your theories! I've never written something that people could speculate on before, it's really fun to see. truly from the bottom of my heart thank u all so much, I'm glad you're having fun so far &lt;3</p><p>anyway, let's get into it!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>To say that Martin is nervous for the debrief the next morning would be a huge understatement.</p><p>He wakes up normally—slowly blinking his eyes open as the sunlight filters through the cracks in his bedroom curtains. For a minute, he feels like he’s back where he was two days ago, just a man all on his own in a house much too big for him and him alone, objectively sad but in no way drained and exhausted and terrified.</p><p>Then he remembers:</p><p>Somewhere in his house there are two other men, one that wants him to be lying and one that looks at everything like it’s one big, impossible puzzle. They’re here because Martin called them after a night spent terrified in his room as the walls shook and a steady rhythm was being pounded against his kitchen door by seemingly no one or nothing at all. A steady rhythm that, Martin now recalls, was worryingly absent the night before.</p><p>Now, usually people would be excited about the fact that they could sleep without an aggressive knocking bothering them from three in the morning all the way until sunrise. To anyone else, it should be a welcome surprise. Martin just feels a pit in his stomach.</p><p>Not wanting to have to talk to Jon on his own, Martin makes the executive decision to stay in bed until he hears the tinny chime of his doorbell. Jon might not actually think he’s lying, might be putting on the whole skeptic act just because he’s secretly worried about him, but that doesn’t mean Martin particularly <em>wants </em>to prove him right.</p><p><em>He knows what he heard</em>. There’s no way he made it up, even unintentionally.</p><p>Like before, Tim and Sasha are the ones to reassure him while Jon and his weird, silent friend—Gerry—simply squint suspiciously and stare into the dark, empty corners of his kitchen.</p><p>“That’s normal enough,” Sasha is saying as she and Tim finish going over the audio and video from the night before, echoing her statement from the other day. “Bit unexpected, but not unheard of. I will admit it’s a little worrisome, especially since you mentioned things had already toned themselves down a little, but it’s not like we can say much after one night of evidence. I’m sure we just have to give it some time to settle in to the altered environment.”</p><p>“Well it’s not like he <em>wants</em> a ghost, Sash, don’t be so cheery about it,” Tim chimes in. He turns to address Martin directly. “She is right, of course, but it’s just as well if it turns out to be nothing at all. None of us think you made anything up—” this is said with an almost unnoticeable glance in Jon’s direction “—but really, if it turns out it’s just some weirdo having you on, that’s a lot better than malevolent entities, or what have you.”</p><p>Martin chuckles a little awkwardly. “I just want to know what it is. I don’t really care if it is a ghost, at least then I’ll have figured it out. Then I can deal with it.”</p><p>“You,” Tim replies, “are extremely well-adjusted, Martin. Don’t worry, we’ll have found your ghost in no time.”</p><p>Jon, for some reason, bristles. “You shouldn’t say that.”</p><p>“What?” Martin gives a confused laugh, unsure if he’s being messed with. It’s impossible to figure Jon out, he finds, and he’s not sure what he would have said in the past ten minutes that would make him react like <em>that</em>, all stiff and chastising. “I really just need to know what it is, if it’s a ghost then at least I can go from there, maybe—”</p><p>“<em>Don’t</em>. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”</p><p>That hits Martin, the insinuation that he doesn’t know what’s going on. He <em>doesn’t</em>, sure, but it’s not for lack of trying. He certainly doesn’t deserve to be yelled at for it, especially not by someone who apparently starts his process by deliberately <em>not </em>believing his clients and won’t even try to explain to him what <em>is </em>happening.</p><p>“Excuse me?”</p><p>“You don’t—” Jon sounds like he’s gearing up for a tirade when a loud, electronic scratching noise comes for one of the nearby speakers, effectively cutting him off.</p><p>“Sorry!” Sasha shouts, forced cheerfulness plain on her face. “That was my bad, plugged the wrong end into the wrong outlet, you know how it is. Jon, can I get your opinion on something real quick?”</p><p>“Sasha, you know I don’t know anything about—”</p><p>It’s then that Gerry puts a hand on his shoulder, tapping out that same indiscernible rhythm against the fabric of his sweater. Jon sighs and lets it go, crossing the room to where Sasha waits to show him something that Martin is sure is of no significance to him whatsoever. Tim sends an apologetic glance in his direction.</p><p>Martin shrugs, a <em>what can you do? </em>that he doesn’t really mean, and goes back to idly kicking his legs where he sits on the kitchen counter. He looks back to where Gerry had been standing—to thank him, or maybe to ask over what Jon meant by that, he isn’t quite sure—but when he does, the man is gone.</p><p><em>Christ</em>. Is anyone at any point going to stop being so damn <em>cryptic </em>with him all the time? He really hopes they find that ghost soon, just so he can get this all over with. No more knocking, no more strange white men staring into space in his kitchen and appearing and disappearing at will. Just him, alone in his house, like it’s supposed to be. It was lonely, sure, but at least he didn’t have so damn much to worry about.</p><p>*</p><p>If Martin had thought that Gerry would be a little more forthcoming with <em>whatever </em>his job was in this investigation—that he would actually, say, <em>talk </em>to Martin once or twice, maybe even a hello—now that they’d been properly acquainted, that would have been perhaps the single worst assumption he had ever made. It’s not until Martin almost runs him over, for the second time in as many days, that the man deigns to talk to him.</p><p>Martin manages to avoid any awkward encounters with Jon that night, thank god, but that luck apparently isn’t going to extend to interacting with Gerry. He isn’t so sure this one is entirely his fault, though.</p><p>Once again, Martin hadn’t even been aware that Gerry had shown up with Jon until he ran into him upstairs. This time, however, instead of being lightly surprised over seeing him at the top of the stairs, Martin runs into the man in his <em>own bedroom</em>. So, yeah, he’s not that much inclined to say that the awkwardness over the encounter is really his fault.</p><p>Hospitable to fault, though, Martin starts with an apology. “Um—sorry, I…I didn’t know you’d need to be in here?” Gerry looks a bit startled at being caught but recovers quickly. “I can, um—I can stay in a different room for the night I suppose, only I would like a bit of warning next time if you need to be in here.”</p><p>“No, sorry, I’ll be out of here in a minute,” Gerry says with a casual shake of his head. “Just needed to have a quick look around, I really thought Jon would have told you.” Something about the way he says it makes Martin think that the exact opposite is true.</p><p>“Jon doesn’t really tell me much of anything,” Martin says, startling himself with his candor. “Kind of keeps the process to himself, which—I suppose if it works, right? Never mind that it’s my house, and I have a right to know what’s going on, and he’s really not allowed to get upset with me when he won’t even tell me what’s happening, and—” He grimaces a little, cutting himself off. <em>You can’t complain to someone about their friend, Martin, that’s rude</em>.  “Sorry, I’ll let you get on with it. Let me know if you need anything.”</p><p>Gerry takes a couple steps toward the bedroom door before stopping himself with a sigh, turning to drop himself onto the edge of the bed lightly enough that Martin can’t even hear the ancient springs squeak in protest. There’s a part of Martin that sort of wants to argue with him—who walks into someone’s bedroom without their knowing and just acts like they belong there—but Gerry starts speaking before he can.</p><p>“Look, you know how I told you Jon’s had a rough go of it, before? That’s why he acts like a bit of a prick about these things?” Martin nods a confirmation and Gerry inclines his head, gesturing for Martin to take a seat on the mattress next to him. A bold move for someone who doesn’t even live here, let alone regularly inhabit this very room, Martin thinks, but he sits anyway. “Right, well,” Gerry continues, “there’s a lot to it, actually. I’ll tell you a bit of it, but you shouldn’t bring it up to him—he doesn’t like to talk about it often, and if he wants you to know the full details then he’ll do it on his own.”</p><p>Martin’s a little afraid that if he speaks it’ll make Gerry not want to tell him, somehow. From the way he speaks, it’s a delicate subject; one Jon likely keeps pretty close to his chest. Delicate enough, maybe, that he would change his mind if Martin were to make any noise to remind him that he was there. As much as Martin <em>does </em>want to know, to understand, he has to ask.</p><p>“Would he mind that you’re telling me this much, then? If he doesn’t like to talk about it.”</p><p>He’d like to understand Jon better, he thinks, but not if it comes at the expense of going behind his back. Jon already doesn’t trust him, and after whatever had happened that morning to make Jon sound so stiff and upset, Martin isn’t so sure he wants to push his luck with anything else. The desire to know is overwhelming, if only to quell his own nagging suspicion that the man really, truly dislikes him, but he understands the need to keep things like this private. Lord knows he has his fair share of traumatic experiences that he doesn’t talk about.</p><p>Gerry tips his head to the side for a moment, considering. “I don’t think so,” he decides. “He doesn’t mind if people know about it, it’s just…hard for him to talk about. Needs to be in the right headspace for it, so it’s best if you don’t catch him off guard.”</p><p>It’s enough, for Martin. Maybe it shouldn’t be, maybe he should tell Gerry to just leave it alone, that he’ll get over himself in an hour or two, but…it sounds sincere. Odd as Martin finds Gerry, he doesn’t seem like the type of person to be quite so mean-spirited, especially not to someone he seems to be so close to.</p><p>He’s afraid he can’t find any good reason to keep Gerry from clueing him in on Jon’s sordid past. And Martin <em>does </em>want to know. More than that, he’s self-aware enough to admit that the outside validation of knowing that none of the tension was because of anything that <em>he </em>did, personally, is something he really rather needs at the moment. He inclines his head, signaling for Gerry to go ahead.</p><p>“I’ve known Jon for a long time,” Gerry starts. “Since he was really young, actually, around nine or so. That was around the time his grandmother had taken him in—or maybe it had been a couple years earlier, I can never remember. Things from around then, they’re always…a little fuzzy.” <em>Things from around then</em> strikes Martin as an odd turn of phrase. It almost sounds like the fuzziness of his memory had to do with something more than just time passing.</p><p>He doesn’t ask. Gerry continues.</p><p>“There was…a lot of trouble in that house.” Gerry’s voice is slow as he speaks, like he’s choosing his words carefully. Fair enough, considering it’s a story that Martin really has no right listening to. It doesn’t bother him; Gerry has no reason to trust him with all the details. “I—<em>something </em>was in there. It wasn’t a good place. I don’t know if we—if it had always been there, or if it just came for him, but…it <em>wanted </em>him, for whatever reason. He almost didn’t make it out.” Martin shivers. Jon was <em>nine</em>? Maybe younger? And he almost <em>died</em>? Christ, no wonder he’s so hesitant with Martin’s so-called haunting.</p><p>He thinks that’s it, Gerry clenching and unclenching his jaw for a minute in silence. It looks like it’s hard for him to talk about, and Martin isn’t about to press on it, but he has to wonder if maybe Gerry had been there, too. If maybe things were fuzzy because it had happened to <em>him</em> as well, if he was recounting a story that had to be recounted to him because it had hit him just as hard and he had wanted to forget. Martin is just about to thank him for his insight, to save him from being forced to relive things, but before he can Gerry unclenches his jaw, clears his throat, and continues on.</p><p>“It started out rather mundane,” he says, voice rough despite the clearing of his throat. “Just little things, you know? Kind of like your knocking, only for him it was this scratching at the windows. He says it never bothered him, but after the first couple times he started sleeping with his curtains pulled shut. Nothing was ever out there, and his room wasn’t facing any trees. Again, kind of like your knocking. It shouldn’t have been happening, but it was.”</p><p>Gerry huffs out a dry laugh, then, looking off into space like he’s stuck in the memory. “He’s always been so <em>stuck </em>on logic. It bothers him enough that he can’t even look out his window anymore, but since there’s never been anything out there for him to <em>see</em>, it couldn’t have been real. If it was, it was probably coming from somewhere else in the house and the noise was just traveling through the vents.” He shakes his head, looking almost fond except for the hard set to his eyes. “Never wanted to bring it up, either. Even when he was younger, he told me he knew that he was ‘deeply annoying.’ Didn’t want to bother his grandmother, thought he was putting her through enough as it was. Didn’t want to bother her, no more than he already was by being orphaned, so he pretended it didn’t bother <em>him</em> even when it did. He was a <em>kid</em>, someone should have been helping him, <em>listening</em>, I should have—” Gerry stops, swallowing hard. “Sorry. That was more than I meant to say.”</p><p>“S’alright.” Martin had told himself he wouldn’t interrupt, but something about the way Gerry spoke, the way his face twisted into a mixture of grief and anger, made him feel compelled to offer up his reassurance. He still doesn’t get it—either of them, Jon and Gerry both—but he understands. He doesn’t have many details at all, but he knows enough. Jon almost died. Something terrible happened, something that apparently wasn’t all that different to what’s happening to Martin, at least not at first. Something bad enough that Gerry can hardly remember the finer details, that he blames himself even though he couldn’t have been much older than Jon had been. Martin doesn’t need to know much more than that. It’s not his place.</p><p>Gerry startles, a bit, like he’d forgotten Martin was there. “Right, anyway. It was bad. <em>Really </em>bad. And in the beginning, it started just like this one did. He almost didn’t survive that one on his own. And he doesn’t want anyone else to go through that, so he starts every single investigation with one thought and one thought only: that it’s a lie. Because if it isn’t a lie, then it’s something else, and in his experience something else isn’t something you make it away from in one piece.”</p><p>And it’s not like <em>that </em>sends a chill down his spine or anything. Because Martin <em>knows </em>he isn’t lying, he <em>knows </em>what he heard, and if that means it’s something else…well, it doesn’t exactly inspire optimism.</p><p>“Hey,” Gerry says, pulling him out of his worries. “That’s not going to happen to you. I—I couldn’t help Jon, for the longest time, but I figured out how. It’s not going to get that bad, this time. We’ll make sure of it.”</p><p>Martin doesn’t know why, but he believes him. Or at least he wants to, so he does. He’s not sure how to respond, how to clear the heaviness in the air. As it turns out, he doesn’t have to respond at all. He doesn’t quite want to call it luck.</p><p>The knocking starts up, then. It’s gentle, at first, just like the first time it had happened. The gentleness doesn’t last. The soft triplets disappear as soon as they had begun, replaced instead with angry, forceful banging. It gets faster and faster until one group of three is hardly distinguishable from the one before it, reaching a fever pitch in no time at all. Martin can barely breathe with how loud it is.</p><p>Gerry is on his feet almost as soon as it starts. His brow furrows in confusion for a moment before he makes his way quickly out the door. “Stay here,” he tosses over his shoulder as he leaves, no arguments to be made.</p><p>And the thing is, Martin doesn’t want to argue. He doesn’t <em>want </em>to go down there, doesn’t want to have to face anything again and have it be <em>nothing</em>, doesn’t want to be afraid of something he can’t even see, something that just wants to throw punches at him for no rhyme or reason and doesn’t even have the decency to face him while it does it.</p><p>So he doesn’t. He locks the door behind Gerry, sits with his back pressed hard against the wood, and waits.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>huh! wonder what all that means.</p><p>see u guys on friday (february 12th)!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Day 4, Night 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>obligatory "thank you for all the lovely comments I love u all so much" check! muah, that's a kiss just for u please place it directly on your forehead or in your pocket, whichever u prefer &lt;3</p><p>I've seen a lot of people pose some really good theories, so let's see how they hold up with this chapter!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“What do you mean there isn’t anything on the recordings, I—” <em>hid in my room all night while I let a white man go downstairs to investigate it for me, Jesus Christ. </em>Yeah, Martin doesn’t particularly want to finish that sentence out loud.</p><p>Tim shakes his head, clicking around at something on one of their computers. “I don’t know, there’s—the batteries on half the recorders are dead, the tapes for the cameras facing the back door are blank, everything else just didn’t turn on, and it—it looks like the microphones weren’t hooked up at all? But they <em>are</em>, right now, and they’re <em>working</em>, I just tested it, I don’t know what’s going on.”</p><p>It makes an alarm go off in Martin’s head.</p><p>
  <em>If it isn’t a lie, then it’s something else.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Something else isn’t something you make it away from in one piece.</em>
</p><p>He swallows down the quickly building panic, focusing instead on the heart of the issue. Martin isn’t lying. Granted, the alternative to that is evidently much worse than he’d initially anticipated it being, but still. No one here has gotten a shred of evidence that Martin is actually being genuine with his claims, that what he says is the truth, and it’s their fourth day going into this. If they don’t get something soon, Martin’s afraid they’ll dismiss him outright. How much longer can people keep trusting him if he doesn’t give them a reason to?</p><p>“Okay, but—but it <em>happened</em>, last night, I <em>heard </em>it, it was—it was worse.” Martin is desperate, now. He <em>needs </em>them to know, <em>needs </em>them all to believe him. Because if they don’t, then he’s <em>alone</em> and he has to deal with this all by himself, and—and, you know, he’s used to being alone, whatever. But he’s just so damn <em>tired </em>of it. All this time helping out other people, putting them before himself, letting it chip away and away at him until there’s nothing left…it’s exhausting.</p><p>And he <em>doesn’t know what to do</em>, not on his own.</p><p>So maybe he wants help. Maybe, just this once, he wants to be selfish and ask someone to just trust him enough to stick around, to lend a hand even when they have no proof. He doesn’t want to do everything alone anymore. He doesn’t want to <em>be </em>alone. And maybe having that particular crisis about four people you don’t even really know that well is kind of silly, but everyone has their breaking point. Apparently, this is his.</p><p>All things considered, they’ve been kinder and more patient to him than he’s ever been allowed to experience.</p><p>Martin looks wildly around the room, searching for something, <em>anything</em> that will give him some sort of credibility. Why hadn’t he recorded it on his phone? Or really, why hadn’t he done <em>anything</em> instead of just shutting down and <em>sitting </em>there?</p><p>Jon catches his eye, idly tapping his fingers against the handle of his cane as he thinks to himself, and that’s when he remembers.</p><p>All the tension and the fear he’d felt the night before and he’d forgotten that he <em>wasn’t</em> alone. Two people were in the house with him, and he <em>knows </em>that at least one of them had heard the same thing he did.</p><p>Martin doesn’t want to ask Jon, doesn’t quite feel like Jon would have his back in it all despite what he now knows about him. Besides, if he’s being honest, Martin still doesn’t feel like they’ve quite recovered from the awkwardness of the previous morning. He’s not sure he’s ready to blow past that without at least talking about it first.</p><p>He turns his head, seeking out Gerry instead. When his gaze lands on him, Gerry’s eyes go wide. It’s funny—it almost looks like he’s afraid. It gives him a split second of hesitation, just enough for someone else to interrupt his panicked silence.</p><p>“No, I—I heard it too,” Jon says, slowly. “I didn’t catch the clock <em>right </em>when it happened, but it was definitely around three. Didn’t stop at all until the sun came up. It’s exactly what Martin explained the first time.”</p><p>Martin’s surprise at the defense might be a little unwarranted. He’s always been good at masking his emotions, though, and he hides it well as he spins his focus back to Jon. He has a split second to think that Gerry looks oddly relieved as he’s spared from Martin’s attention.</p><p>“Well?” Sasha asks, all business. “Did you see anything?”</p><p>“No,” Jon answers. His voice is flat, almost like he’s going to try and deny it despite having been there, having heard it. Before Martin can protest, however, he seems to understand how he sounds and scrambles to correct. “Not that—not that I’m saying nothing happened, I’m just saying I didn’t <em>see </em>anything. The knocking was there, and it was—it was <em>loud</em>. But there wasn’t—there wasn’t anything around to make the noise. It shouldn’t have been happening. But it was.”</p><p>Martin swallows.</p><p>
  <em>Nothing was ever there.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>It shouldn’t have been happening, but it was.</em>
</p><p>It’s a little too close to the story from last night for comfort. Martin doesn’t forget that it ends with someone almost dying.</p><p>Tim clears his throat, then, closing one of his laptops with a resounding click and pulling attention to him. “Right, well—we’ll bring extra batteries for tonight, and I’ll show you how to make sure everything is running properly. You won’t be able to <em>fix </em>anything, if it goes really wrong, but you’ll at least be able to know when things get unhooked or come offline. You’ll be able to replace what isn’t working. And really, I hate to say it Martin, but if all the equipment keeps going haywire like this…I think we’ve gotten ourselves into something much worse than just a regular ghost hunt.”</p><p>And that…well, that does precious little to bolster Martin’s already waning confidence.</p><p>*</p><p>When Jon arrives later that night, he surprises Martin by being the one to start a conversation with <em>him </em>rather than the other way around. Martin’s just wavering between leaving Jon to his own devices on the couch in the living room and disappearing without a word when Jon speaks up.</p><p>“Listen,” he starts, “I, er—I think it might be best if we stick together, tonight. I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but I have an idea, and—and if I’m right…I just don’t think we should be on our own tonight, is all.”</p><p>He’s a little awkward, as he speaks, but Martin <em>feels </em>a little awkward, so it’s not like he’s about to begrudge him for it. “Oh,” Martin responds. “I—yeah, that’s fine. Do you—is it bad? What you think is happening?” As he asks, he drops himself into the corner of the couch, giving Jon enough room that he doesn’t feel crowded. Martin still doesn’t know where they stand, really, even now that he knows Jon’s prickliness has nothing to do with him as a person, and it’s not like he’s that small of a guy besides.</p><p>Jon gives him a smile at that, albeit a little strained. It doesn’t do much to ease Martin’s worries. “I’m sure it will all be fine. I hope I’m wrong, mind, but—no, it shouldn’t be terrible.”</p><p><em>Shouldn’t</em>. Martin picks up on the word choice. Just because something <em>shouldn’t </em>be, doesn’t mean it <em>won’t.</em> He understands that much. His house <em>shouldn’t </em>have been knocking around wildly, as if on its own, until just after seven in the morning, but it still <em>was</em>.</p><p>“That’s—” he starts, wondering how best to respond without sounding rude. Jon had been trying to reassure him, he’s certain, even if it didn’t quite work. Martin doesn’t want to make him feel bad about it. “Well,” he continues. “That’s…good.” He cringes. “Sorry, that was rude, I’m just—"</p><p>Jon laughs, more genuine than his attempt at a reassuring smile from earlier. “No, it’s fine. I know that wasn’t very reassuring at all, I just…I don’t want to worry you, and until I’m absolutely sure what it is there’s no reason to.”</p><p>“That kind of does the opposite, you know,” Martin points out. “Now I’m still worried, I just don’t know why.”</p><p>“I know. I’m sorry.” Jon looks a bit frustrated with himself, then, pulling a face. Martin tries not to find it as endearing as he does. “But it would be worse if you did, trust me. And I could still be wrong, I truly don’t know anything more than you do at this point, it’s just…a feeling I have.”</p><p>“Are your feelings usually wrong?”</p><p>Jon twists his lips in a way that Martin guesses must mean <em>no</em>. “I—they have been. I mean, I can’t be right <em>all </em>the time, no one is.”</p><p>Martin decides to take pity on him, then. “It’s alright, Jon,” he laughs, “don’t stress over it. You said it shouldn’t be terrible. That’s not nothing, right?”</p><p>“I’m sorry I don’t have anything else for you,” Jon says apologetically, pressing his lips together. “I wish it was easier, but—”</p><p>He cuts himself off. Martin thinks he knows what comes next. He doesn’t know the full of what happened to Jon when he was younger, still, and he thinks bringing it up on his own would be quite rude—not to mention that Jon doesn’t even <em>know </em>that Martin knows, already—but it’s not much of a stretch to guess at what Jon’s thinking about.</p><p>Nine years old, scratching at your window, not a single source in sight. Not wanting to bring it up in case his grandmother got annoyed with him, keeping it all to himself until it almost killed him.</p><p>The similarities don’t escape Martin. The only difference is that he <em>had </em>asked for help, and truth be told he’d only asked for help because an Instagram ad, of all things, was front and center on his home page the very next morning.</p><p>Suffice it to say, Martin isn’t mad at him for omitting details. It’s not that he likes to live in ignorance, really, it’s just that he prefers to be optimistic about things. Jon being careful not to divulge everything makes that easier. It hadn’t been <em>reassuring</em>, exactly, but it <em>had </em>made things better, in a way.</p><p>Jon thinks things are going to be “not terrible.” That’s something Martin can run with. And really, the less he knows about how Jon almost got killed by a ghost at nine years old, the better it is for his optimistic streak.</p><p>Martin assumes that’s going to be it, at least until his ghost decides to either show itself or disappear for another two days, but Jon twists a little on the couch suddenly, so that he’s facing Martin more fully. He tries to tuck one of his legs underneath him but flinches almost immediately when his left knee bends past a certain degree. He moves to stretch it out instead, stopping when he can’t figure out where to rest it.</p><p>“I don’t mind feet on the table,” Martin says, gently, inclining his head towards the coffee table in front of the couch. “Make yourself at home.”</p><p>Jon takes the offer with a quiet thank you in acknowledgement. Once he’s comfortable, he turns back to face Martin once more. “Right, well,” he starts, hesitating a little. “About yesterday, I wanted to apologize for—”</p><p>“You really don’t have to, Jon, it’s—”</p><p>Jon shakes his head. “No, really. Please?” He waits for Martin to acquiesce before continuing. “I just—it’s difficult, sometimes. There’s a lot of people who call us out thinking it’s for a laugh, and most of the time it is. Most of the time it’s something innocuous, easily fixable without our having to get involved at all, and we can just leave after a couple days with nothing much to it. But I always go into it thinking the worst is going to happen, even when I don’t want it to. I tell myself it’s just another loose floorboard, or disconnected pipe, but the entire time I’m thinking about the worst possible outcome.”</p><p>The laugh Jon gives after that is a bit wild, his eyes unfocused, and Martin can tell that he’s stuck about twenty years in the past. “And that hardly ever happens, but—and this isn’t to say that <em>you </em>were making light of it, but when it comes to that, people don’t really want to believe it. It starts to become a joke. So when you—again, I know you didn’t mean it like that, but when you were so casual about it, I kind of…spiraled, I guess.</p><p>“And that’s my own fault. We weren’t getting very many results, but I kept getting this <em>feeling</em>, and…nothing was adding up. I <em>felt </em>like something was wrong, but we—I couldn’t <em>see </em>that anything was wrong, and that…it scared me. So I’d worked myself up, already, and I started to take it out on you without explaining, and I—I’m sorry.”</p><p>Martin had already forgiven him, is the thing. People have bad days, he knows, and once Gerry had explained a little more to him the night before he wasn’t really upset about how intense Jon had gotten. He’s sure if <em>he’d </em>almost been murdered by a ghost before he’d even grown out of playing with toys yet, he would have been rather intense about the whole thing, too.</p><p>Still, though, it’s nice to hear. It makes Martin feel warmer towards him, still, even more than when he’d heard him make a joke at his friends’ expense, or when he’d seen him smile involuntarily at some stupid stunt Tim had pulled. Martin had always thought Jon was <em>cute</em>, sure, had always been drawn to him in a purely aesthetically attracted way, but this is the first time he’s ever felt like they could actually <em>get along</em>.</p><p>Martin never expects people to give him an apology; he just forgives them. But Jon had offered one, without being prompted, and he doesn’t even look like he expects Martin to accept. Like if Martin <em>didn’t </em>accept, Jon would just nod and continue on professionally and finish his job without any mishap and with minimal awkwardness.</p><p>It’s better than nice, actually. Martin thinks he might want to hug him.</p><p>When Martin stays silent, unable to communicate how much he fully appreciates the gesture without sounding incredibly sad, Jon starts to ramble.</p><p>“I don’t, um—” Jon swallows, throat clicking, and reaches down for the metal water bottle he always keeps with him, twisting and untwisting the cap. “I don’t expect you to accept, of course, but I just wanted to—that is, I wanted to make sure you knew that it wasn’t your fault, I mean—"</p><p>It’s a bit frantic, but no less earnest. A memory of the night before floats through Martin’s brain. <em>Even when he was younger, he told me he knew that he was “deeply annoying.” </em>It makes Martin’s heart ache, a little. It’s not fair, really. Definitely not as a child, but not now, either. Jon isn’t good with people, Martin can tell, and he has a bit of a problem communicating, but it’s not like he doesn’t <em>try</em>. Even when he was exceptionally abrasive, he had good intentions. And he’s trying <em>now</em>.</p><p>He’s obviously close with the friends he already has. He’s making an effort to open up to Martin, to recognize that they’d gotten off on the wrong foot and it was up to him to correct that. He <em>is </em>correcting it, right now.</p><p>None of that in particular strikes Martin as “deeply annoying.”</p><p>Martin’s hand reaches out to cover Jon’s, where it’s still fiddling with the lid to his water bottle. The contact makes the flow of words cut off rather abruptly, but he doesn’t pull away. “It’s alright,” Martin insists, “really. I’m afraid, too. I know you don’t—" He hesitates, not quite knowing if he should mention what Gerry had told him yet. It’s probably best if he doesn’t, not so soon. They’ve only just started talking to each other like regular people, he can’t imagine that now is the time. He backtracks. “I know you weren’t trying to be a jerk on purpose. You didn’t think I was taking it seriously, and you were worried about what might happen to me. I get that, it’s okay.”</p><p>“Still, I shouldn’t have—”</p><p>“No, probably not. There are other ways you could’ve gone about it, definitely, but you didn’t. And I forgive you for it.”</p><p>“Martin—”</p><p>“We all have bad days, Jon,” Martin says. “You said it yourself, you were already stressed. And sure, maybe that’s not an excuse, but I’m accepting it as one. Especially because I know it came from a place of you caring.”</p><p>Jon shifts a little, then, looking a touch uncomfortable, but not terribly so. His hand twists beneath Martin’s and Martin feels a warmth rise to his cheeks as he remembers to remove his hand. Jon looks up at the lack of contact, and Martin would venture to say he looks almost startled at the loss. His hand twitches a little where it is methodically twisting the top of his water bottle on and off before continuing the process. After a minute, he lifts the bottle to his lips and Martin pretends not to watch the line of his throat as he swallows. He twists the cap back on and clears his throat; twists it back off, takes another sip, and closes it again.</p><p>“Thank you, Martin,” he says finally, voice a touch rough. “That’s more than I deserve, probably.”</p><p>Martin shakes his head, once again insistent. “I don’t think so.”</p><p>It’s hard to tell, with Jon’s dark skin and the lack of sufficient light in the room, but Martin thinks he can see the slightest bit of a flush crop up around the skin of Jon’s ears, as well.</p><p>Jon clears his throat again. “Right, well. Thank you. Should we…settle in?”</p><p>They settle in. Martin learns a little bit more about Jon, in those moments before the knocking is supposed to start. Things that aren’t so traumatic as what he’d learned the night before.</p><p>Like how he gets easily disenchanted with an author’s particular writing style after seeing it too many times in a row, or how he’s never really taken to poetry that well, even without getting bored of one certain style, or, once they decide to flip through Martin’s Netflix queue, how he’s charmingly infatuated by cheesy, mundane travel shows.</p><p>Or, after Martin mentions offhand that he’s rather into poetry himself, how he backtracks and says he doesn’t <em>mind </em>poetry, really, he’s just never found anything that suited him, and he’s sure Martin’s is perfectly wonderful, and no, really, Martin, I know if I read it you would change my opinion on poetry in an instant. That one makes Martin crack a smile so wide he can’t look at Jon for the next twenty minutes.</p><p>It’s nearly three when Martin realizes he hasn’t seen Gerry at all since the morning. He turns to ask Jon over his whereabouts and gets stuck.</p><p>See the thing is, Martin is very gay and he is very <em>lonely</em>, and Jon is very <em>cute</em>, and it turns out that he is also actually very <em>nice</em>. Some might even say charming; Martin certainly would. And so when he turns to see Jon settled into the corner of his couch, huddled in a blanket Martin had offered him sometime around two and earnestly paying attention to something someone is saying about making the most of your luggage space when you go on vacation, he kind of just…his brain needs to reboot for a second. By the time he gets himself together enough to ask, the knocking starts up again.</p><p>There is no preamble this time, no slow build. If he'd thought last night was bad, it was nothing compared to this. The knocking starts at a ten and doesn’t let up. There’s hardly any space between one knock and the next, and each one is so forceful that Martin can feel it in his <em>teeth</em>.</p><p>
  <em>KnockKnockKnock,KnockKnockKnock,KnockKnockKnock,KnockKnockKnock.</em>
</p><p>It goes on and on, fast and loud and demanding.</p><p>Jon startles so hard, when it starts, that he almost falls off the couch.</p><p>“<em>Christ</em>,” he mutters to himself, getting himself upright and grabbing at his cane before moving to cross the doorway into the kitchen. “It wasn’t like this last night, was it?”</p><p>Martin shakes himself back into focus, trying to block out the knocking enough that he can hear himself think. He scrambles into motion, following Jon into the kitchen. “No, I—it got really bad last night but it at least led into it. This is…it hasn’t been this bad, before.”</p><p>Jon’s already squinting at one of the monitors when Martin follows him to the small table in his kitchen. “Do you—” he hesitates, shaking at the mouse before turning the screen to face Martin. “Is this all static?”</p><p>Martin blinks, focusing in on the screen in front of him. “Yeah, it—is it connected? Are the batteries on?”</p><p>“Everything’s fine,” Jon answers. “Everything <em>should </em>be fine. The batteries are still mostly full, everything’s connected…there’s nothing to <em>fix</em>, nothing to replace. I tried switching cameras, like Tim mentioned this morning, but it’s just…more distorted.” He switches the camera then, like he’d explained, and it is, in fact, more distorted.</p><p>It’s a different <em>kind </em>of distorted, though. Martin can almost make something out of it all, and he moves Jon’s hand out of the way before he can switch the cameras back once more. “Hold on,” he says, “does it—does it look like there’s someone there?” He turns the screen back to Jon and watches as Jon squints at the image. Martin can see the moment he notices something different, too.</p><p>There’s a faint outline, off in the corner. It’s not enough for Martin to know where, exactly, in his house it is, but he knows it’s a person. Or at least it looks like one.</p><p>Just as Jon opens his mouth to respond, the image clears up. For the slightest fraction of a second, there it is: a woman with deeply pitted skin, worms crawling out of every visible part of her body.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>that was literally so rude they were having a MOMENT. smh</p><p>well, see u guys on tuesday (february 16th)!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Day 5, Night 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>hi hello, happy tuesday once again! as always, thank u so much for all the love and support y'all give to this story I see all your kind words and each and every one of u has a very special place in my heart. I promise I'll stop sounding like a broken record soon, but until then u WILL know how much I love and appreciate u guys &lt;3</p><p>anyway not to brag but I think u guys are gonna like this chapter kind of a lot, so let's get this thing going!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Martin wakes up in the morning in the tub of his upstairs bathroom, with Jon’s elbow digging into his hip.</p><p>He doesn’t remember much from the night before. After they’d seen the woman on the video feeds things went a little south. Or, well…south<em>er</em>, as it were. The image of a woman with <em>worms </em>crawling out of her was enough to put him off on its own, but then the doorknob started rattling and he’d thought it looked like the wood might be starting to splinter and he didn’t really want to take his chances. Nothing was <em>out there</em>, nothing he could see just by looking through the windows, but if a security camera tells him he’s about to be eaten alive by worms—or at least that someone <em>else </em>was eaten alive by worms, and they might be somewhere nearby—he’s not really going to question it. There are quite a few things he’s willing and able to explain away but that’s not one of them.</p><p>So at the first sign of the door potentially giving way, he’d grabbed Jon by the wrist without really thinking and pulled him up the stairs to the second floor, fast as he could without putting any extra strain on Jon’s leg or getting tangled up in each other and falling right back down the steps.</p><p>He’s not sure why he chose the <em>bathroom</em>. Not sure why they chose to huddle up in the tub with the curtain closed either, to be honest. Or how he managed to sleep through any of that at all. Doesn’t really remember much of the night through the deeply certain rush of <em>oh my god we’re going to die</em>. You’ll excuse him if he doesn’t have all the answers right now.</p><p>When he tries to check his phone the dead battery symbol flashes across the screen briefly before simply going black again. Right. Martin’s phone was dead because he’d left his phone light on most of the night because he didn’t want whatever was out there to find them if they’d had the overhead light on. That explains hiding behind the curtain, at least. Probably not the best lines of defense against something that is apparently so powerful it has the ability to make his <em>entire house shake</em>, but whatever. He and Jon <em>didn’t </em>end up being consumed by ghost worms, so, you know. Martin can’t really argue with the results.</p><p>Jon stirs a little where he’s leaning against his side and Martin suddenly remembers exactly how close they are. It <em>shouldn’t </em>make him blush, only Martin had noticed exactly how pretty Jon was almost the moment he met him, despite how objectively rude Jon had been at first. And, well, Martin <em>had </em>gotten to know him since then, at least a little. It wasn’t much beyond his reading habits and his love for inane travel shows, but it was enough to endear him. Martin is self-aware enough to admit that he’d spent at least a good forty-five minutes last night having an entire gay freak out just because Jon was sitting a cushion away from him on the couch.</p><p>So yeah, he’s blushing a little when Jon’s stirring brings him in closer, close enough that Martin can feel a breath on his collarbone. Close enough that Jon’s elbow digs further into his hip, actually, and that, more than the embarrassment of having Jon wake up to see them practically cuddling in a bathtub, is what makes him finally uncurl himself from his hunched over position so he can shake Jon back into consciousness.</p><p>Sure, Jon is cute, and sure, Martin might want to hold his hand and take him for a walk down to the park sometime, but Jon is also <em>very bony</em>. And just because Martin is fat doesn’t mean that feeling is particularly pleasant.</p><p>“Wh—hm? Martin, why are we in a bathtub?”</p><p>Martin snorts as Jon flails a little, trying to catch his bearings. Any other time and Martin might have taken a moment to think some very disgustingly flowery things about the way Jon’s voice sounded when it was rough with sleep. As it is, he simply files it away for later.</p><p>“We were running from what appeared to be a woman full of worms,” Martin reminds him.</p><p>“Yes, I remember that,” Jon responds, clearing his throat a little when his words still come out a touch gravelly. “Hard not to. Still doesn’t really explain the bathtub, though.”</p><p>“Yes, well. To be fair, the bathtub was sort of a panic decision. Wasn’t thinking of much at all except for getting as far away from the back door as possible.”</p><p>Jon gives a considering hum. “Fair enough. I suppose it <em>did </em>work.”</p><p>“Exactly, so I’ll have no more slander against my bathtub, thank you.”</p><p>“Terribly sorry, it is a <em>very </em>lovely bathtub. Certainly my first choice for a safe house next time I see myself getting eaten by ghost worms.”</p><p>Martin chuckles a little at that. “Don’t think I would go quite <em>that </em>far,” he says. There’s a twinge in his knees and he pulls himself up, wincing a little as he untangles his legs and feels the ache of a night spent twisted up in a bathtub settle into his limbs. Once he’s on the other side of the curtain, he hears Jon follow suit. “I think if we’re <em>expecting </em>this, maybe next time we have a better plan in mind.”</p><p>Jon hisses a little when he comes to his full height outside of the tub, keeping weight off his left leg by leaning against his cane.</p><p>“Are you alright?” Martin asks.</p><p>“Yes, just—” Jon cuts himself off, wincing once more as he tries to bend his knee back and forth very slowly to loosen it up. “I want to be clear <em>I’m </em>very glad we ended up huddled together in your tub instead of as worm food, but I don’t think my joints were particularly happy with the choice. The left knee isn’t so keen on bending these days, and I haven’t quite gotten to the point yet where I just reflexively <em>know </em>how far it can go. Got into a car accident recently, nothing terrible but it was enough to warrant minor surgery and the surgery left the cartilage a little…well, I’m sure you can tell it’s not great.” He grimaces, shaking his head. “I’ll be alright in a minute, I just have to keep some pressure off.”</p><p>As not-reflexive as it is for Jon, Martin’s sure he knows even less about it. He still stays close—not so close that he’s hovering, just enough for him to be there if Jon needs it—but otherwise leaves Jon to work it out on his own. This is his life, no matter how recent, and it really isn’t Martin’s business to question him.</p><p>Once Jon looks like he’s adjusted enough, they make their way slowly downstairs. “If you <em>do </em>ever need to lock us in a bathroom again, would you mind it being a downstairs one?”</p><p>Martin winces. “Sorry, that <em>was </em>stupid wasn’t it?”</p><p>“A bit,” Jon agrees, although not unkindly. “It’s considerably harder to navigate stairs with a bad knee when you’re not worried about getting eaten by ghost worms, apparently.”</p><p>“Sorry, I—”</p><p>“Martin, I’m not punishing you for anything. It was a joke, I’ll be fine. Stairs and I aren’t really friends, most days, but I won’t hold it against you when it may have saved our lives. It’s at least easier to go down than it is to go up.”</p><p>It doesn’t help, really, but Jon knows his own limits better than Martin would anyway. If he says he’s alright, then he’s alright, and Martin’s guilt can take a backseat. It’s really not about him.</p><p>At the bottom of the stairs, Martin has to psych himself up a little to look into the kitchen. He’s not sure what he expected to see—cabinet doors hanging off their hinges, door splintered to pieces on the floor, plates and bowls shattered all around the space maybe. Instead, it looks perfectly fine. Like nothing much of note had happened at all.</p><p>Jon comes up behind him, peering around the doorway to the kitchen. “Huh,” he says.</p><p>“Yeah,” Martin agrees. “Expected it to show a little, at least. Kind of makes it look like we exaggerated.”</p><p>“I mean, you <em>were </em>the one who decided to run off before we could get a good look at anything.”</p><p>Martin whirls around to face Jon, ready to argue but softening when he sees the amusement hidden in Jon’s eyes. He plays along. “You know, I <em>could </em>have left you down here.”</p><p>“Evidently, I would have been fine.”</p><p>“Right, well, I didn’t <em>know </em>that? A thank you would be nice, actually.”</p><p>Jon lets go, then, a real, genuine smile taking over his face as they trade quips back and forth. “You’re my <em>hero</em>, Martin,” he says. “What would I ever do without you?”</p><p>Martin flounders. Three hours give or take crouched in a bathtub with the man while they try not to die because Martin’s house is <em>haunted</em>, and suddenly they’re, what, flirting? Is that what this is? Are they really—?</p><p>A quick <em>knock-knock-knock </em>echoes through the living room, making him jump about a foot in the air and startle out of that train of thought. It takes him a minute to get his heart rate in order when he realizes it’s probably just the others.</p><p>Right. Haunted house. Evil worm ghost lady. Angry knocking. Get it together, Martin.</p><p>As he and Jon make their way to the door, something makes an ugly squelching sound under their feet. “Do we want to know what that was?” Martin asks, pointedly looking up at the ceiling.</p><p>“I’m going to go with no,” Jon answers. “But I think maybe we need to.”</p><p>“Yeah. Count of three, then?”</p><p>“Count of three.”</p><p>On three, they look down. Just as Martin had feared, most of the floor from his living room to his front door is littered with thin, silvery worms. They’re startlingly similar to the ones they had seen on the video screen last night. The ones that weren’t supposed to be <em>real</em>.</p><p>Martin takes a deep breath. “Not sure about you, but I <em>cannot </em>deal with this right now.”</p><p>“Not sure I <em>want </em>to.”</p><p>And so they don’t. The rest of the way to the front door, they pretend nothing at all is the matter. No worms under their feet, no eerie crawling sensation up the backs of their necks, no shivering memories of the night before.</p><p>Gerry is still strangely absent, Martin notices, when Tim and Sasha walk through the door. He doesn’t have much time to ask when Sasha points out to the porch and says, “Did you know you have a wasp’s nest building in your gutters?”</p><p>Because of course he does. Why <em>wouldn’t </em>the wasps choose the week he was being haunted to add yet another problem to his plate?</p><p>“That’s nice,” he responds with fake cheer. “I <em>also </em>have dead worms all over my floor that were probably left here by a woman that isn’t even real. Tea?”</p><p>As he leads them all to the dining table, deliberately ignoring the squelch of dead worms beneath his feet, he catches a flash of black hair in his periphery.</p><p>Odd. He hadn’t seen Gerry come in with the others, but perhaps he’d come in just a few steps behind and Martin had missed him. Tim <em>had </em>been the one to close the door behind them, it would have been easy to miss someone coming up the rear. Martin was definitely frazzled enough, that was for sure.</p><p>Martin can tell Jon must not have noticed either, as he suddenly perks up at the sight of his friend slinking through the room and kicking at worm carcasses. When Gerry finally makes his way to the rest of the team he doesn’t say much of anything, but that’s par for the course. Martin thinks <em>he </em>would be keen to know exactly what the hell happened if he’d missed a night of ghost hunting and came back to something like <em>this</em>, but Gerry was hard to figure out on a normal day and Martin’s brain wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders at the moment.</p><p>Instead, all Gerry does is come up behind Jon and rest a hand on his shoulder. He briefly taps something against Jon’s sleeve and lets himself fade into the background while the rest of them discuss what they’ve found.</p><p>*</p><p>The video footage from the night before isn’t much help. Martin’s not surprised—when they’d gone to look at it as the knocking started, all it had shown was static. Even when the woman had appeared on the screen, the image was distorted almost beyond visibility. The fact that it ends up too corrupted to corroborate what he and Jon had both seen is disappointing, sure, but it doesn’t catch either of them off guard.</p><p>It’s not hard to know that <em>something </em>terrible had happened, though. The microphones at least pick up the banging and the horrible, wet sound of worms flooding into his kitchen. And even if they hadn’t been able to hear anything, the evidence was sort of still littered around most of the first floor of his house.</p><p>It’s their first piece of physical evidence that isn’t just word of mouth. That means a few things.</p><p>Namely it means that Tim and Sasha try to spend about an hour convincing them to get out of there, to give up the ghost as it were, no pun intended, and just leave well enough alone. Gerry, Martin notices, doesn’t contribute much to the argument except to occasionally tap a rhythm against the back of Jon’s hand or shoulder or arm.</p><p>In the end, they come to a consensus. Martin <em>needs </em>to know what’s going on now. He can’t just leave it alone and disappear off to somewhere else, not after getting this far. And from the way Jon keeps up most of their side of the argument, he has to assume he feels much the same way.</p><p><em>There’s something seriously </em>wrong <em>here</em>, Jon had said to the two of them. <em>Not like the ones that went wrong before. This is…different, and I’m not sure I like that.</em></p><p>Martin isn’t sure if it’s the tone in Jon’s voice, or the idea that this could be much, much worse than it looks, or the way Gerry is standing glowering in the corner, looking more and more concerned as the conversation goes on. Whatever it is, it gets Tim and Sasha to concede.</p><p>They <em>should </em>stay, see what’s going on. At least for one more night. There’s no point in abandoning ship <em>just </em>as they’ve finally started to figure out what’s happening. So long as they admit that there’s nothing wrong with leaving in the middle of the night if things get worse.</p><p>That’s not exactly hard for Martin to agree with. Much as he wants to understand what’s going on, to know how to fix it so that everything can go back to the way it’s supposed to be, he’s willing to admit that he doesn’t really want to stick around and see if he actually <em>does </em>get eaten the next time a rotting woman full of flesh-eating worms shows up at his house. If things do escalate beyond that point, it’s not going to be hard for him to leave.</p><p>This is all to say that they take a few more precautions this time. Martin sets up a laptop in one of the spare bedrooms so they can keep an eye on things in relative, possibly imagined safety—downstairs, this time, but still as far away from the kitchen as possible. It’s just a door, sure, but it’s at least one that locks. It’s at least a sturdy one that would give them half a chance if anything happened. And there’s a window, in case they need to make a quick exit.</p><p>They don’t really have to worry about that until three in the morning comes around, though. As bad as everything has gotten, it’s at least kept itself to its routines. That’s something of a mercy, Martin supposes.</p><p>It also allows Martin to have Jon to himself for a couple hours without having to worry about potentially being murdered by ghosts, which he’s starting to understand is something that he very much enjoys.</p><p>Tell him three days ago that he would have been laughing at some college anecdote Jon was telling him as Martin danced around him in the kitchen preparing mugs of tea, and he might have choked a little. Jon didn’t like him, he would’ve thought, Jon thought he was a <em>liar</em>. Jon thought he was fabricating his own little Scooby-Doo haunted mystery for a laugh, as if he <em>liked </em>avoiding looking too closely at his kitchen windows because he was afraid of what he might see, and as a result Martin didn’t like him very much either, he would’ve said.</p><p>But here they are. Jon, talking freely and excitedly in a way that Martin had yet to see from him, not even in small glimpses from his interactions with the others; an obvious attempt at trying to distract Martin, but a not altogether unwelcome one. And Martin, feeling for just a moment like he isn’t trapped in his own home, feeling far too much pride in the pleased little hum that escapes Jon’s lips when he takes his first sip of tea.</p><p>It is all wonderfully, domestically boring, in a way that Martin’s never been allowed to have. It would almost be nice, if it weren’t for the looming threat of everything else. Maybe, if they survived the night—if they managed to figure out what was going on, managed to stop it—maybe then Martin could be allowed to have it again. Maybe it <em>would </em>be nice, properly this time.</p><p>He can hope, he supposes. Hope is a dangerous thing to have, most days, never really has treated him well, but it’s not going to stop him. It never has. Martin’s always been optimistic to a fault, and if nothing else, it at least gives him something to hold onto. It has to be his turn eventually, right? Law of averages, and everything.</p><p>Martin could almost call himself relaxed as the night goes on. For all Jon had initially presented himself as standoffish and abrasive, he can be a rather successfully calming presence when he wants to be. By the time they decide they have to get a move on to settle in for the main attraction of his little haunting, he starts to really believe that everything will be alright. They’re prepared this time; they’ll figure it out, they’ll take care of it, and maybe Martin will land himself a date in the process.</p><p>Jon insists on washing the mugs on his own, not having any of it when Martin assures him that he’ll just take care of it later. And Martin can be stubborn, when he wants to be, had been prepared to sit there and argue with him for as long as it took, but Jon had simply placed a hand on the small of his back to move him out of the way and that was really all she wrote.</p><p>So maybe Martin is more than a little touch starved. That’s not the point.</p><p>He forgets to take his phone with him when he walks to the spare room down the hall where they’re set up for the night. When he walks back to get it, he hears two voices in his kitchen. The closer he gets, he can tell the second voice is Gerry.</p><p>It’s…odd. He hadn’t expected Gerry to be here. Not that he <em>minds</em>. Elusive as he is, Martin thinks he could really get to like Gerry if they had more time to know each other. It’s just that Gerry hadn’t been there the night before, hadn’t mentioned coming along at all earlier in the day, and he hadn’t even been in Martin’s kitchen three minutes ago, so. Martin’s a little confused, is all.</p><p>He supposes that maybe Jon could have called him for help before Martin had noticed he’d forgotten his phone, or that Gerry had intended on coming in the first place and Jon had just forgotten to mention it. But then, what, he’d just showed up? Martin hadn’t heard anything. The back room <em>was </em>pretty far away from the front door and the kitchen, but…he would have heard, right?</p><p>Either way, there’s a guest in his kitchen and Martin isn’t one to be rude on purpose.</p><p>“Oh!” Martin exclaims as he crosses the doorway into the kitchen. “Sorry, I didn’t know you’d be coming tonight. Did you, um—did you want anything, before…well, before the show starts, I guess?” The question comes out on a strained, halfhearted laugh. He’s not quite at the point of joking about it, apparently.</p><p>And either it’s the worst joke that Gerry and Jon have ever heard, or something deeply wrong is going on right behind him and he’s about to die because the two of them don’t answer at all. Gerry looks a little pale, actually—more so than usual, that is. And Jon looks like he can’t quite decide between being terribly frightened or being terribly confused.</p><p>“Um. If I turn around there’s not going to be like—like a giant man-eating worm or something behind me, is there?” He laughs again, much more nervously.</p><p>“You—you can see him?” Jon asks. As soon as the question is out of his mouth, Gerry winces.</p><p>“Y-yes? Should I—should I not be able to?”</p><p>It’s a joke, it has to be. A mean-spirited one, sure, but Martin can get over that. He’s gotten over worse in the past, what’s one stupid prank about someone supposedly being invisible while his house is currently haunted by <em>people who are invisible</em>? Jon will be laughing at him any minute now, he’s sure.</p><p>Jon doesn’t start laughing. “No,” he says. “No, you really shouldn’t.”</p><p>“What do you—”</p><p>“Right,” Gerry interrupts. “I suppose we have some things to sort out before everything.” He glances at the clock, noting the time. “Better make it quick, I’m afraid ‘the show’ is supposed to start soon.”</p><p>Martin is still very firmly stuck in the belief that this is a joke. It doesn’t make sense for it to be anything else, what are they on about? “Why shouldn’t I be able to see you? You’ve been here since that first day, I’ve been able to see you the whole time, why—why wouldn’t I now? What happened?”</p><p>“Well,” Jon says slowly. “The thing is, that…well, I mean, Gerry, he’s sort of—”</p><p>“I’m a ghost, Martin,” Gerry answers, interrupting once more. “Honestly Jon, I said we didn’t have much time.”</p><p>That’s when Martin cracks. “Wha—you…<em>you</em>? <em>You’re </em>doing this?”</p><p>It makes both Gerry and Jon recoil. “What—no! Why would it be me, I was there <em>with you </em>the first night the knocking started coming back.”</p><p>“I don’t know, you just told me you were a ghost! I’m not supposed to be able to see you; I <em>can’t </em>see what’s doing this to me, what other conclusion am I supposed to make?”</p><p>Gerry gives him a rather unimpressed look that Martin is inclined to think is maybe slightly inappropriate for the situation. “Do I really look like a decaying woman full of worms to you?”</p><p>Martin tries to match the unimpressed look with one of his own, despite how horribly his head is spinning at the revelation. He doesn’t <em>want </em>them to have done it—they’d been so nice to him, he <em>likes </em>them, but they’re really not giving him a lot to go on. “Well you looked like a living human person to me a few days ago, so apparently appearances can be deceiving. And anyway, if it wasn’t you then where were you last night? Why haven’t you told Jon anything about this?”</p><p>“I wasn’t here last night <em>because </em>I hadn’t told him anything about this,” Gerry answers. Before Martin can prompt him on what he means by <em>that</em>, he continues on his own. “Look, no offense but I don’t know anything about you. I come in thinking I’m going to find a ghost hiding in a corner, and what do I find instead? Nothing. And then there’s <em>you</em>. You notice me. You <em>talk to me</em>, like I’m—like I’m not dead. You have to understand how from my perspective that seems a little suspicious.”</p><p>Whatever brilliant explanation Martin had hoped for, this certainly wasn’t it. “Excuse me? How am <em>I </em>the suspicious one in all this?”</p><p>Before Gerry can respond, Jon jumps in. “It’s not him. He should have told me you could see him,” he says, narrowing his gaze at his friend, “but he didn’t do this.”</p><p>“How do you know?”</p><p>Jon laughs, sounding very much like he doesn’t think anything at all is funny about the situation. “He always has been annoyingly overprotective, since…Martin, you remember how I apologized for blowing up on you, before? Because I thought you weren’t taking it seriously.”</p><p>He <em>does</em>, but— “What does that have to do with anything?”</p><p>“More than you think,” Jon mutters, staring down at the floor in front of his feet. When he returns his gaze to Martin’s, he’s the one that looks haunted. “I didn’t tell you exactly why it bothered me. Why I was so afraid that something terrible was happening when I couldn’t see it.”</p><p>Martin doesn’t know how to respond without telling him he already knows and revealing what Gerry told him a couple nights prior, so he doesn’t.</p><p>As it turns out, he doesn’t have to. “About that,” Gerry jumps in, interrupting before Jon can start. “I may have <em>slightly </em>mentioned it to him already. Not the whole thing, couldn’t really without telling him about all the—” he gestures vaguely around himself “—you know. But he does know a little.”</p><p>Jon raises an eyebrow, looking a touch unimpressed but not altogether upset.</p><p>“Okay, look,” Gerry says. “In my defense, you <em>were</em> being kind of a dick. Didn’t want him to kick you out of his house and call someone else before we had the chance to figure out what was going on. I really only told him about the scratching bit and that you almost died.”</p><p>“I’m really sorry,” Martin cuts in, “I wasn’t sure if you’d want me to know but Gerry said that you wouldn’t mind, and—”</p><p>“Okay, throw me under the bus—”</p><p>Jon shakes his head, looking more amused than anything. “It’s fine,” he says. “He’s right, I don’t mind if people know. I’m not upset that he told you, or that you listened. I <em>do </em>wish he’d told me he talked to you, but it’s not about any of that.” Martin still feels a touch guilty, but the tension in his shoulders relaxes some. “I still should tell you the whole thing, though. It explains a bit.”</p><p>Martin nods, gesturing for him to go on.</p><p>“I was nine,” Jon continues. “What happened to me wasn’t all that unlike what’s happening to you now. It was a scratching, instead of a knocking, but…I never saw anything, no matter how hard I looked. Always thought it sounded a lot like spiders, but there were never any there. Convinced myself I was just being paranoid for a while. I tried to take a few photographs once, but they just came out distorted—it was always dark outside, anyway, and they never developed correctly. I could ignore it, at first. It wasn’t a big deal; I could just blame it on the wind, even if that didn’t quite make sense either. But it started getting louder, and I started…<em>hearing </em>things. Nothing interesting, just a whisper here and there. I could hardly ever make out any words, but I knew <em>someone </em>was speaking to me.</p><p>“I didn’t want to do anything about it, I just wanted it to go away. No one would have believed me, and I didn’t want to bother them anyway. My grandmother never wanted to raise another kid, and I’d always felt bad if I thought I was taking up too much of her time. I <em>know </em>I was difficult to deal with; I didn’t want to make it worse by telling her something I wasn’t even sure that <em>I </em>believed.”</p><p><em>A deeply annoying child</em>, Martin remembers. He aches for him, just a little, despite the fact that he still isn’t sure how this is supposed to answer anything.</p><p>“And then it got worse,” Jon continues. “I’m not sure how she never noticed—although maybe she did, and just thought I was having a tantrum or something and decided it was best to leave me to it. Wouldn’t have been out of character for her, really. The scratching didn’t sound like it was coming from my window anymore, it just sounded like it was <em>there</em>. Like it was in my room, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. The whispers graduated to screaming, although I could still never tell what they were saying. They still felt like words, they were just…distorted, somehow.</p><p>“One night I’m huddled up under my blankets, trying my best to drown out the noise by pressing my hands over my ears as hard as I can, and I feel something watching me.” A shiver runs down Martin’s spine. Jon smiles fondly. “I didn’t want to look. But then the noise stopped, and I could still feel something there, and…I just wanted to know, I guess. It was all I ever wanted, really, to know what was going on, so I could understand and move on. So I looked. And there was Gerry, same as he is now.”</p><p>It floors Martin, a little. Maybe he should have expected it, given that he knew Gerry was a ghost now, but…he hadn’t exactly put together that maybe Gerry had been a ghost <em>the entire time</em>. It makes sense, he supposes. The way Gerry had stuttered over his words as he had been explaining; little quirks like changing “we” to “it” and “I” to “him,” the odd turns of phrases he had been using during his own recounting of Jon’s haunting.</p><p>Oblivious to Martin’s sudden connecting of dots, Jon continues on. “Maybe I should have been afraid, yelled for help, there was a strange man in my room and I’d been terrorized by strange whispers and violent scratching for months, I knew what that would have meant for most people. I wasn’t afraid, though. All I knew was that everything stopped, and then he was there. I asked him who he was, he laughed at me and said that friends called him Gerry, and that was it. He told me he would help me make the scratching go away, and I believed him. For a while, they did. He stuck around, and we talked, and I felt better than I had in months. Any time I started feeling this static at the edges of my thoughts, he’d glare at something I couldn’t see, and it would just go away.”</p><p>Jon pauses for a minute, looking over at Gerry. A silent question passes over his eyes, and Gerry nods. “It was his mother,” Jon explains. “I don’t know when they’d gotten there, or how long she’d been waiting, but…whatever her deal was, she decided to go after me. It got worse, of course. Maybe I’ll tell you the full details someday, but for now…I know he didn’t do it. Because when it was me, he helped. Almost at the cost of his own wellbeing. And I can understand why he didn’t tell you, even though I still don’t agree with it.”</p><p>Martin can understand, too, now that he thinks about it. Eerily similar hauntings, both done by something that wasn’t there and escalated in severity the longer they went on. For Jon, the something that wasn’t there turned out to be real, and more than that it turned out to be really <em>bad</em>. For Martin, apparently there was nothing there at all. Which, given what he knows now…yeah, he can understand why Gerry may have been a little suspicious.</p><p>Wait. <em>Nothing there at all</em>. Martin had known that he couldn’t see anything out his back door when everything went wrong last night, but he’d always figured that it was because it was a ghost. But if Gerry couldn’t see it, and he’d been apparently able to see it—see his <em>mom</em>—before, for Jon, then…what did that mean for Martin?</p><p>“Wait, when you say that nothing is here,” Martin starts, “what do you mean? How am I being haunted if there’s nothing here, what about the woman we saw?”</p><p>“The woman is just a manifestation, something the haunting needed to take shape. To mess with you. That’s what I was trying to explain to Jon before you came in,” Gerry answers. “I think I’ve figured it out, but—”</p><p>Before Martin can hear his theory, everything goes very, very wrong, all at once.</p><p>Just like last night, the knocking starts loud and hard enough to shake the foundations of the house. Just that on it’s own wouldn’t have been much to write home about. It’s sad that Martin’s starting to find the violent knocking routine, but it <em>is </em>expected. It hardly startles him beyond a slight flinch as it cuts off all conversation.</p><p>It gets worse, though. Not just the knocking, but…<em>everything</em>.</p><p>A mug in the sink shatters, followed almost immediately by the one sitting right next to it. Soon, the sound of broken ceramic joins the incessant banging as Martin assumes the rest of the dishes in his cupboards follow suit. There’s a rhythm to it, like they’re each being broken one at a time, deliberate.</p><p>Then comes the distinct, squelching sound of what Martin can only imagine must be hundreds of worms flooding through the crack beneath his back door. He can barely even pick out that they <em>are </em>worms, only knows because the color is similar to the ones he’d found in his living room earlier in the morning. The whole thing is like one squirming, writhing mass, coming towards him like a tidal wave. He doesn’t get the chance to panic or ask questions before Gerry is pushing him and Jon along, towards the back room.</p><p>“Go,” he says, no argument to be found in his voice. “I’ll come right behind you.”</p><p>Martin doesn’t exactly <em>want </em>to leave Gerry out there on his own, not when the worms just keep growing in number and it looks like they might be gaining speed, but he <em>is</em> a ghost. He figures that means that Gerry has a higher chance of making it out of the encounter unscathed than he and Jon would.</p><p>It’s a few minutes before Gerry joins them. When he does, the noise is gone. No preamble, no warning, just cut off as abruptly as pulling the needle off a record.</p><p>Jon takes one look at him at he walks through the bedroom door and narrows his eyes. Martin notes that Gerry looks rather peculiarly tired, for someone who’s already dead.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>oh gerry keay, we're really in it now</p><p>chapter 6 comin at y'all on friday (february 19th)!</p><p>*jon has secondary knee osteoarthritis caused by surgical trauma, as briefly touched upon in this chapter. just wanted to make it clear what I was going with</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Day 6, Night 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>hello and happy friday! once again thank u everyone for having so much fun with this story and also for telling me how much fun you're having and theorizing and cursing me when something happens that keeps people from communicating, I love it.</p>
<p>before we start today I just wanna say: the heavier themes that this fic has been tagged with come into play a lot more in this chapter. I've pulled it into the story in chapters prior, but this chapter is kind of the catalyst. I don't go too overly much into detail with it all, but that being said if any of u find it a little Too Heavy, please don't feel bad for closing out your window. take care of yourself first!</p>
<p>and with that, let's solve us a haunting</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They survive the night. Martin ends up being too keyed-up to ask Gerry to clarify what he thinks the haunting is about if it isn’t some ghost trying to ruin is life. It doesn’t seem all that important when he’s huddled against a bedroom door with a ghost hunter and his ghost best friend as they go back and forth arguing over more lighthearted stories from Jon’s childhood to try and brighten the mood while they wait to see if anything supernatural is coming to kill them.</p>
<p>It works, Martin supposes, in that it keeps him from finally snapping in two and fully spiraling into what probably would have been a very ugly panic attack.</p>
<p>Everything’s easier to work through in the daytime, though, and Martin finds that once Tim and Sasha arrive he feels a little calmer and a little more centered. Simply having people in his house—people who care, ostensibly, and Martin remembers how troubled Tim had looked when he made Martin promise to leave as soon as possible if anything went too crazy so he thinks that he must have to care at least a little—makes him feel less helpless, somehow. They’re here to help, they don’t want to see him get hurt…he hasn’t had a lot of that, recently or ever, and he’s especially grateful that he has it now.</p>
<p>It goes unsaid that he shouldn’t mention anything about Gerry. Given that Martin had only ever seen him interaction with Jon, he assumes the others don’t know anything about him, and if Jon hadn’t told them anything up to now, Martin can’t imagine he wants to dive right into the whole conversation headfirst when they have rather more pressing matters to take care of.</p>
<p>They don’t really have much of a choice, though, when Sasha starts combing through the camera feeds.</p>
<p>“Hold on,” she says, “right there. Do you guys see that?”</p>
<p>The figure on the screen can’t be anyone else. There, just outside his back door, is Gerry. Just for a flash, not for any great length of time, but it’s enough. Enough for everyone to see it, to notice that the ruckus abruptly stops not long after he appears. Of all the times for the video to come out crystal clear, it had to be right then.</p>
<p>Understandably, they do what Martin had done the night before.</p>
<p>“Is that it?” Tim asks, squinting at the image frozen on the screen. “Do you think we’ve figured it out?”</p>
<p>Jon squirms a little uncomfortably from his seat at the table before speaking up. “I don’t think so, it’s not really a lot to go on, is it? It’s the first time he—it has shown up.”</p>
<p>Sasha quirks an eyebrow. “There’s nothing else there, Jon, we’ve never seen anything other than Martin’s worm person and we had to throw that out because it was so corrupted that we couldn’t tell if anything was actually there or not.”</p>
<p>Jon flounders for a moment before responding. “Right,” he sighs. “Well I guess now is as good a time as any.”</p>
<p>Before either Sasha or Tim can ask for what, exactly, Gerry suddenly gets a little brighter.</p>
<p>Huh. Martin hadn’t really noticed before, but Gerry <em>did </em>look a bit faded, compared to the rest of them. Maybe he wasn’t as observant as he’d thought.</p>
<p>Gerry gives them Tim and Sasha a nonchalant wave, all bravado. “Tim, Sasha. Nice to meet you properly.”</p>
<p>Sasha’s eyes sort of bug out of her head. “Excuse me? Who are you?”</p>
<p>“Gerry Keay,” he answers. “And it’s not me, I already had this conversation last night. You can ask Jon or Martin about it later, but right now we <em>really </em>need to talk about what’s going on because I have a theory but I’m going to need some confirmation.”</p>
<p>He looks at Martin when he mentions confirmation, and Martin feels rather a lot like a spotlight has been shone on him.</p>
<p>“Um, sure? What—confirmation on what, exactly?”</p>
<p>“First,” Gerry starts, “I want to say I’m very sorry but please remember that I <em>did </em>think you were evil for a good day or two.”</p>
<p>Tim’s brows draw together in unison with Martin’s.</p>
<p>“Martin? <em>Evil?</em>” Tim’s voice goes up about two octaves when he asks, incredulous. He looks to Jon for an explanation and Jon throws his hands up in a sort of <em>what can you do? </em>gesture.</p>
<p>“Later,” Martin says, keeping the conversation on track. “Sorry about what?”</p>
<p>“I may have been snooping in your room, that time you found me,” Gerry admits. “It’s your mum, isn’t it?”</p>
<p>And Martin <em>hates </em>it, but nearly a year after her death and the mere mention of his mother is enough to make him tense. His stomach drops. “W-what do you mean? I thought you—you said you couldn’t find anything, is <em>she </em>here?” He’d really thought he was over being afraid of his mother, had finally let himself feel relief instead of guilt at her passing, but the very thought that she <em>might </em>be back to torture him more sends him reeling.</p>
<p>It had never left, apparently. He’d hidden it well enough, tried to forget all the horrible things she’d said—all the horrible things she’d <em>done</em>, by the end, but it all came back as easy as anything. <em>Always in the way, aren’t you, Martin? Christ, can’t you do anything right? Can’t even spare a few minutes of your time for your own mother when all she’s ever done is feed you and keep a roof over your head. No wonder you never made it in the church. Would it kill you to at least walk in and pretend? What are you doing spending all your time with that boy? He doesn’t love you, you know. Not sure why anyone would.</em></p>
<p>Martin had only ever wanted his mother to love him. It didn’t seem like a lot to ask for, he thought. She was his mother, after all, that’s what mothers did. But in the end, she’d only ever convinced him that no one ever would.</p>
<p>He was getting better at that, he thought. Martin’s mother was a horrible person and he was glad she didn’t have anything to say to him anymore—<em>couldn’t</em>, in fact, even if she wanted to. She had never said a thing about him that was true. He didn’t take up too much space. He didn’t always mess everything up. He wasn’t destined to be alone. He’d made all this progress, built himself up all on his own, she wasn’t allowed to take that from him.</p>
<p>He doesn’t realize he’s stuck in his own head until he feels a hand on his shoulder. “Martin—<em>Martin</em>.” Gerry repeats his name a couple times, trying to pull him out of it. “Martin, she’s not here. She’s not here, I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant.” The hand on his shoulder squeezes and it takes him a minute to notice, but he comes back to himself enough to realize that it’s Jon.</p>
<p>Martin blinks and the room comes back into focus. “I—s-sorry, I…I’m fine.”</p>
<p>Tim and Sasha are looking at him with nothing but concern on their faces, and he wishes they wouldn’t. He sort of wishes they would leave. Not really, not actually, but the idea is there. If they weren’t here, he wouldn’t look like such a loser. His problems would still be there, he would still be struggling to breathe frozen in a chair in his living, but at least no one would have to <em>see </em>it. He focuses on the steady pressure on his shoulder.</p>
<p>“It was my mum too, for me,” Gerry says, instead of poking more at Martin’s trauma. “I was stuck there as much as you’re stuck here now. Never could figure out how to get out on my own. She’d always had so much control over me, and I was so afraid of what would happen if I tried anything, anyway. And I was already <em>dead</em>, what did I have to lose? But I’d convinced myself that was just how it was supposed to be. Then some punk nine-year-old had to go and get himself <em>haunted </em>or whatever.” He says the last part with a bit of a laugh and inclines his head towards Jon. Martin shifts, just a little, just enough to see Jon rolling his eyes.</p>
<p>Another hand falls onto his other shoulder, and Martin turns to see Gerry leaning towards him. “She’s not here anymore, Martin,” he says. “My mum or yours. Mine made me feel like I was alone, like she was the only one who tolerated me, and I was just there to do her bidding. I won’t ask you to go into detail about yours, but from the state of things I assume she was about the same.”</p>
<p><em>From the state of things, </em>Martin thinks. Doesn’t take a genius to extrapolate the meaning from that one. “S-so it is me, then?” he asks. “You were right, the whole time, I’m doing this?”</p>
<p>“No, not you,” Gerry assures. “Sometimes things just go wrong. You let something fester for long enough, and it warps until it’s all just rotten. What’s happening here, your house, it—it just went wrong. Your mother wasn’t a good person. Her, all of those bad memories you might have of her, they’re all tied up in here. Sometimes places are haunted by ghosts. Most of the time they’re haunted by memories.”</p>
<p>“So, what, I just have to—forget?” Martin finds himself laughing then, albeit rather harshly. “I thought I was! I was getting help, I started trying to <em>do </em>things again, any time I heard her voice in my head I drowned it out. For the first time in years, I let myself realize I hated her. That I didn’t deserve anything she did, and I hated her for it, and now what? That’s it, I can’t be helped? I’m just going to be like this?”</p>
<p>Jon’s hand slides from his shoulder down to his palm. Martin closes his hand over Jon’s reflexively, tangling their fingers together and clutching at him like he would disappear otherwise.</p>
<p>“Progress isn’t linear, Martin,” Jon says, steady as he holds eye contact. “You’ve come so far, I don’t have to have known you from before to see that. But you’ve been doing it all on your own for so long. And you’re still here, where you can’t get away from her. That can’t be doing you any favors.”</p>
<p>“What do I do then?”</p>
<p>“Do you remember,” Gerry starts, “that first time it got really bad? When you saw the worms, and you took Jon and you hid?” Martin nods. “You fell asleep that night, Jon said. When we looked at the tapes later, everything had stopped early. It only lasted an hour before the footage cleared up and nothing happened after that.”</p>
<p>Martin cocks his head, confused. In his periphery, he can see Tim and Sasha do the same. “What does that mean? I just—I just run, I leave? It’s that easy?”</p>
<p>Gerry gives him a regretful sort of smile. “I’m afraid not. But I think it left you alone because you had someone.”</p>
<p>If Martin thinks back, it makes sense. The night after he’d first called, when the knocks sounded so timid. It was the first time Martin had had people over in years. The night after that, when they disappeared completely. Martin had never had anyone sleep over at his house before, not even as a child. He doesn’t have an explanation for how violent it became after that—maybe it was angry, maybe it didn’t like that he wasn’t alone anymore—but the rest checks out.</p>
<p>It seems too easy to be as simple as all that, though.</p>
<p>“So my—my <em>depression ghost</em>, whatever you want to call it, it’s afraid of people? The power of friendship, that’s how I’m getting out of this?”</p>
<p>Gerry snorts, at that, and despite it all, Martin lets himself feel a bit pleased at the fact that his joke had landed. “Sure,” Gerry concedes, “if you want to call it that. Things are always easier if you aren’t doing them alone. Especially things like this.”</p>
<p>Martin shifts again, startling when he realizes that his and Jon’s hands are still connected. He stays focused on that point of contact, gaze firmly stuck to the small, circular scar on the base of Jon’s thumb when he speaks. “I don’t really have anyone, though.”</p>
<p>The hand in his squeezes. “Sure you do.” He looks up, catching the full weight of Jon’s gaze on his. “Martin, I don’t know if you thought we were all just biding our time waiting to get paid, but…we like you. We care about you—<em>I </em>care about you, and I’m not going to let you do this alone. You don’t have to anymore.”</p>
<p>It’s his mother’s voice in his head, the one he usually tries to drown out, but Martin can’t help it. <em>Are you sure? </em>he thinks. He feels horribly vulnerable when he voices his concerns aloud. “Really?”</p>
<p>The smile Jon gives him then is a sad one, but it’s still enough to reach his eyes. “You’re so easy to love, Martin,” he responds. “How could we do anything else?”</p>
<p><em>You’re so easy to love, Martin. </em>He feels winded. He’d known his mother was wrong—hateful and sick and <em>wrong</em>, she’d just said whatever she could to hurt him. Martin had never be unlovable, but he’d been made to feel like he was. And this was the first time he’d ever heard anything to the contrary from anyone but himself or people who were beholden to tell him that. It was the first time he’d been made to feel like that much was inevitable. <em>How could we do anything else? </em>Like they were helpless to do anything but. As if just being there, just being <em>Martin</em>, was enough. Like that was all it took.</p>
<p>The tears fall before he has a chance to notice the way his vision starts to blur, and he blinks them away. When he speaks, his voice is barely above a whisper. “Thanks.”</p>
<p>“For the record,” Tim says after a moment, “we’re not going to let you do this alone, either. Jon doesn’t get the monopoly on loving Martin, I won’t allow it.”</p>
<p>Despite his cheeks growing slightly darker, Jon seems to find it in him to roll his eyes. “I did say <em>we</em>.”</p>
<p>“Sure you did,” Sasha agrees. “But it did sound a lot like <em>I</em>, for a second there. You’ve got us too, Martin.”</p>
<p>Martin looks at all of them, smile watery as the ache in his chest turns into something softer. He feels lighter than he has in years.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>It’s the most wonderful thing, that afternoon. No one leaves him alone. They all just…stay, without talking about it, without Martin even having to ask for it. Like it had been a forgone conclusion. Like it had just been a reflex. And sure, most of their plan relied on Martin very deliberately <em>not </em>being alone, but this was different. They didn’t need to be there until well into the night, they very well could have gone home for the afternoon and come back just after sundown, like normal.</p>
<p>But they hadn’t done that. They’d gathered together in Martin’s living room and ordered in takeaway and before Martin could apologize for the mess that he’d most definitely had no control over, Tim had quietly taken it upon himself to grab the broom from his kitchen and sweep the piles of worms right out his front door. Sasha, without a word, had followed suit, doing the same in the kitchens. She cleared away the remains of shattered dishes, the slimy carcasses that littered his tiled floor.</p>
<p>Jon had offered to make them all tea, once they were settled, and it was absolutely dreadful, but it was the best cup of tea Martin had ever had. Gerry kept mysteriously disappearing, only to then rematerialize somewhere just behind Tim’s shoulder every single time, causing him to jump about the foot in the air while the rest of them looked on in amusement.</p>
<p>Martin could almost call it normal if he wanted, except that for him normal usually meant flinching away from sudden noises and shutting himself up in his room like nothing much was wrong at all, even when it clearly was.</p>
<p>But even if it wasn’t normal, it was nice. A different kind of normal, maybe, one that he thinks he could get used to. One he hopes that he <em>does</em> get used to.</p>
<p>It’s overwhelming, at first. He hadn’t really noticed how much he’d retreated into himself, how much he’d shied away from company even now when he’d been actively <em>trying </em>to get back into the world, until he’d suddenly been thrown into experiencing the opposite. Going from largely spending time with no one but himself to finding himself entertaining a decent-sized group of people—who were all there for <em>him</em>, and wasn’t that something—felt not unlike getting too close to a gas stovetop while one of the burners was on.</p>
<p>He keeps wanting to flinch away. He’d been doing it for so long that it had simply become a reflex. People don’t usually want to get close to him, not for any extended length of time at least, and if they do then it must be an accident. Almost defiantly, he decides to lean into it instead.</p>
<p>Sasha asks him a question and Martin wants to brush it off, answer with something vague and superficial and turn it back on her to get the attention off himself and instead lets himself go on in detail, forcing back that reflex he has that tells him that no one is ever <em>that </em>interested. It helps that she interjects every so often, asking for clarification or for him to repeat himself if she doesn’t quite catch something, an active participant like he’s never really had. It’s exactly what had put him so at ease with them in the beginning, he recalls. It makes him feel warm now, remembering, realizing that they’ve been genuinely interested in what he’s had to say this whole time.</p>
<p>Tim invites him out to drinks with the rest of them—a celebration, he says, for when everything is right-side up again—and instead of begging off with some thin excuse about needed to clean his kitchen or organize his tax files or something equally terrible, he lets himself agree. <em>If you’re sure, of course</em>, he says, and Tim snorts like he’s said something particularly funny. <em>Martin, if you don’t come, I’ll consider it an insult.</em></p>
<p>Jon hardly strays further than two feet away from him all afternoon unless it’s to offer to get him something and Martin doesn’t want to let that go to his head but he does, just this once, because he’s <em>earned </em>it. A hot man wants to pay Martin special attention, wants to be <em>close </em>to him, and for once Martin is willing to take that at face value. Sometimes, he thinks, things are allowed to be easy. Martin likes Jon and Jon wants to be near him and Martin is going to bask in that for however long he’s allowed, no excuses to be heard.</p>
<p>It’s amazing how quickly overwhelming turns to nice, when he lets himself enjoy it.</p>
<p>For a minute, Martin forgets what they’re all there for. It’s just so <em>nice </em>to be with people for once, talking about and laughing at nothing in particular; just sharing company with people, not because you have to or because you need to, but because you <em>want </em>to. It’s not a side effect of having to go out for groceries or having to call a customer service line or having to wait in line at the post office. It’s not an otherwise ignorable part of some mundane task that he needs to get done. It’s just…<em>fun</em>.</p>
<p>As the skies goes dark and the clock moves forward, however, reality comes creeping back in. The conversation becomes pointed, focused, and the living room turns from a place to entertain to a place to plan. The fuzzy feeling in Martin’s chest becomes a little stickier</p>
<p>He’s not sure how it’s all supposed to go. If they’re supposed to just sit there, and…go about life, keep talking like normal, or if they’re supposed to <em>do </em>something. If he has to scream at the air like all of those cheesy shows on the science fiction channels, yelling about how it’s his house and he wants everything to leave him alone, or if it really is just as simple as “the power of friendship.” Martin has to doubt that he’s that lucky, but he supposes there’s only one way for him to find out.</p>
<p>His nerves get the best of him, once the digital clock on his TV stand goes from PM to AM. He needs to <em>do </em>something, to be helpful. Even if most of the night does end up being sitting and waiting and driving out whatever horrible energy is haunting his house with nothing but the sound of his friends’ laughter, he needs to feel active.</p>
<p>So, he excuses himself to one of the spare bedrooms downstairs to grab extra blankets for everyone.</p>
<p>It’s stupid. It’s not particularly cold at the moment, there’s no draft to use as an excuse, one of them is a <em>ghost</em>. They won’t even be sleeping, it’s not like they’ll need them. But it’s something to do, and sometimes the extra bit of warmth is comforting, and Martin thinks that’s something they might all need at the moment. At least, <em>he </em>would like the extra comfort.</p>
<p>No one questions him. In fact, Jon offers to help. Says it’s a good idea, even, and doesn’t look like he’s just trying to placate Martin because he can tell that Martin is starting to get squirrely.</p>
<p>It shouldn’t come as a surprise, really. Jon has been following him around all day, has hardly let him out of his sight for more than a few seconds. It’s still nice, though, how readily Jon follows him down the hallway. How he grabs onto Martin’s arm for a second to help hoist himself off the couch and lets the contact linger <em>just </em>up until it would be considered awkward.</p>
<p>The spare bedroom Martin leads them too also houses the linen closet. As he digs through the closet’s contents, sifting through everything to try and find something that wasn’t either made of terribly scratchy fabric or half-eaten by moths, he finds himself wanting for small talk. The others can still be heard talking lowly in the front room and Jon is still with him, still <em>there </em>but it all seems too far away suddenly. Like now that he’s gotten just a taste of what it’s like to be around people again, he’s afraid of missing any second of it. Like it’ll suddenly disappear simply because he went into a different room for a few minutes. His skin itches with the silence in the room.</p>
<p>“So, um,” he says into the closet, floundering for a topic of conversation. “So, Gerry.” He cringes. <em>Christ</em> is he great at this.</p>
<p>When Martin turns, a couple suitable blankets in his arms, Jon looks at him with his head cocked in confusion and a fond smile on his lips. “What about him?”</p>
<p>Martin means to say something equally stupid as before, something like <em>ghost, huh? </em>but the soft smile catches him. He thinks back on all clearly adoring smiles between Jon and his friend, all the soft touches and the shared history, and instead of saying something equally stupid as before he says something even <em>more </em>stupid: “Are you two, um…together?” And he immediately regrets it.</p>
<p><em>Oh my god</em>, why did he say that. He throws the blankets off to the side and ducks back into the linen closet to hide his face. Jon is left sputtering on his own behind him. Martin can feel the skin on his neck burning.</p>
<p>Christ alive, <em>why </em>did he <em>say </em>that.</p>
<p>After a moment, Jon seems to finally find his words. “Um, no. No, we—no. <em>No. </em>That’s—hm. I don’t want to say gross, he’s lovely, but he’s been twenty-six since I was nine? Not the sort of relationship you’d end up with from that dynamic. The idea’s a bit off-putting, to be honest.”</p>
<p>“Right,” Martin squeaks, head still buried in the linen closet and hoping his little haunting problem would kick in so it would just swallow him whole already. “Right, sorry, I don’t know why I—sorry. It’s just that you two are so close, and the way you—I thought—hm. I <em>think </em>I’m going to stop talking now, actually.”</p>
<p>When Jon speaks next, he sounds slightly amused. “Well,” he says. “I can promise you that we definitely aren’t dating. Just really good friends.”</p>
<p>And because it just <em>really </em>isn’t Martin’s day, when he turns to bring out another blanket he’s deemed worthy, determined to pretend that everything is normal, he says, “oh, good.”</p>
<p>Jon doesn’t let it go unnoticed. “Good?”</p>
<p>“I-I mean—” Martin stutters, the flush around his neck spreading further to cover his cheeks.</p>
<p>“You <em>really </em>thought I was dating Gerry when more than half the time we’ve been alone together, I’ve been flirting with <em>you</em>?”</p>
<p>It takes a minute for Martin’s brain to catch up. “I mean I didn’t <em>really </em>think so, I just wanted to be—wait, you what?”</p>
<p>Jon laughs. “Martin, if we make it out of here tonight, would you—”</p>
<p>Well, he’s embarrassed himself enough already. Martin answers embarrassingly quickly, well before the question’s even been asked. “Yes, absolutely.”</p>
<p>“You haven’t heard what I’m asking yet.”</p>
<p>Martin shakes his head definitively, prompting another amused laugh from Jon. “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “Answer’s yes.”</p>
<p>The way Jon looks at him then is something he’d never thought he’d get. Unbearable softness, amusement, warmth…Martin could call it adoration, if he wanted to, and he finds that he does. It’s so easy, so sweet, so…so <em>loving</em>.</p>
<p><em>You’re so easy to love, Martin. </em>And what do you know, maybe he is.</p>
<p>“Okay,” Jon says, eyes shining. “It’ll be a date, then.”</p>
<p>It’ll be a date. A <em>date</em>. Martin has a date.</p>
<p>Martin is hardly given sixty seconds to celebrate this fact (privately, in his head) before Sasha shows up in the door frame, smirking at the both of them. “Adorable as you two are,” she says, and despite the teasing lilt to her voice she seems genuine, “we <em>do </em>have a haunting to take care of. In case you’ve forgotten why we’re here.”</p>
<p>“And here I was thinking I was on an episode of Matchmaker,” Martin responds, deadpan. “I can’t believe you all would pull a bait-and-switch on me like this.”</p>
<p>Despite his protest, Martin grabs the pile of unrejected blankets off the mattress and follows her back to the living room. He doesn’t <em>want </em>to leave that moment in the spare room, not quite yet, but they do have rather more pressing matters at hand. It helps that Jon doesn’t hesitate to hold onto Martin’s arm with his spare hand as they make the short walk down the hall, even when the pile of blankets in Martin’s arms makes it a little awkward. Not every moment that passes is a moment lost; sometimes it’s a moment gained.</p>
<p>The others take the blankets gratefully, despite their lack of necessity. Tim takes to wearing his like a cape, and it’s earnest enough that Martin can’t tell if it’s simply to lighten the mood or if it’s a genuine personal choice. Either way, it helps him feel more normal. That new, floaty kind of normal that he still can’t quite believe is his.</p>
<p>It ends up being something of a waiting game, like Martin had feared. There’s not much for him or anyone to do except wait until something happens. What they do once something does happen has yet to be determined, but Martin would rather focus on one thing at a time. Right now, he chooses to check the clock every ten or so minutes in between steadily devolving conversation that becomes more and more subdued as the clock keeps ticking.</p>
<p>Finally, eventually, the clock blinks and it’s three in the morning.</p>
<p>The clock blinks again and it’s three-oh-one.</p>
<p>Again and it’s three-oh-two.</p>
<p>Three-oh-three, three-oh-four, three-oh-five. Martin’s breath catches in his throat. Jon’s hand squeezes at his from underneath a blanket. Nobody makes a sound. Ten minutes becomes twenty becomes twenty-five and Martin could almost call himself calm.</p>
<p>Is that it? he thinks. A week of increasingly loud banging, followed by a worm infestation, followed by every single dish he owned shattering all at once in his cabinets, and this is how it ends?</p>
<p>
  <em>Knock. Knock. Knock.</em>
</p>
<p>And then a pause.</p>
<p>And then <em>knock. Knock. Knock.</em></p>
<p>And then a pause. And repeat.</p>
<p>And then it stops. And then nothing.</p>
<p>The clock blinks and it’s three thirty-one in the morning.</p>
<p>The clock blinks again and it’s three thirty-two.</p>
<p>Three thirty-three, three thirty-four, three thirty-five. Martin’s hands are shaking, where Jon keeps them clutched tightly in his own. Nobody makes a sound. Ten minutes becomes twenty becomes twenty-five and Martin is gearing himself up for what happens next.</p>
<p>There’s a dull thud from inside the kitchen. Martin pitches forward in his seat on the couch and sees a cabinet standing wide open. Another thud, this time louder, and the cabinet below the first springs open of its own accord. A creak and the cutting board rolls out from underneath the sink. A clattering sound and one drawer shoots open, followed rather abruptly by another. He jumps at the sound of a heavy metal pan falling from the rack onto the floor. A tile cracks and he tries not to flinch.</p>
<p>The clock blinks and it’s four in the morning.</p>
<p>The clock blinks again and it’s four-oh-one.</p>
<p>Four-oh-two, four-oh-three, four-oh-four. Martin is tense in his seat, legs barely touching the cushions as he prepares to run if he needs to. Gerry unfolds himself from the ancient armchair in the corner, back straight and eyes wide. Nobody makes a sound. Ten minutes becomes twenty becomes twenty-five and Martin feels a distinct sense of dread.</p>
<p>All hell breaks loose.</p>
<p>The kitchen door bangs open, windows shattering as it collides with the wall. Drawers start turning themselves over, emptying their contents over the floor. The stove clicks and a harsh <em>whooshing </em>sound can be heard as the flames from the burner shoot up high. Something brushes against Martin’s arm, on the other side where Jon isn’t sitting, and he flinches, smacking at it on instinct. His hand comes away wet and the stain on his skin eerily resembles the same stains that the worms had left on his floors.</p>
<p>He watches in a frozen panic as the lone knife sitting on his counter sails through the doorway, embedding itself in the wall just above the television.</p>
<p>Something grabs at Martin’s shoulders then, hauling him up and pushing him towards the door. “You need to get out,” comes Gerry’s voice.</p>
<p>Martin strains to collect his bearings through the blood rushing in his ears. Jon, clutching onto his right arm, pulling Martin slightly behind himself. Gerry, pushing at his shoulders, desperately trying to get him to move. Tim and Sasha, sprinting ahead to fling open the front door and usher them all outside.</p>
<p>He shakes his head and the ringing in his ears dissipates. “I thought—I thought you said being with other people, it would help. That’s why it stopped early the last time, it was supposed to <em>work</em>.” Martin is panicking, he knows, staggering backwards through his front door as his house practically implodes in front of him. He hadn’t expected it to be this easy, nothing ever was, but it was supposed to <em>work.</em> He’s supposed to be okay now, everything is supposed to go <em>back</em>.</p>
<p>He can’t lose everything now, not when he was just starting to get it all back in the first place.</p>
<p>They make it onto his front lawn and Gerry slams the door shut behind them, leaning heavily against it as the harsh triple knock starts up again in earnest, this time pounding relentlessly against the door they’d just left. Martin has just enough presence of mind to spare a thought for how Gerry, a <em>ghost</em>, is going to keep the door shut on his own, but he’s spiraling enough that he doesn’t question it.</p>
<p>“It was supposed to <em>work</em>,” Martin tries again. “What happened, what—what did I do wrong?”</p>
<p>Jon squeezes his hand against the arm he’s still holding onto and Martin reaches out, grabbing at it desperately holding on tight like it’s the only thing keeping him together. For all that’s going on, it probably is.</p>
<p>Gerry shakes his head. “Nothing,” he answers, “it’s not your fault. It <em>is </em>working, that’s why it’s so bad. Before, when it was just one or two of us, it didn’t matter. It was enough to keep most of the pressure off, to tone it down a bit, but that was when you were still holding yourself back. Before you let yourself make a real connection. Now that you have, it’s…it’s scared, I think. It doesn’t want to let you go.”</p>
<p>“That’s really too bad,” Martin says, “because it can’t have me anymore.”</p>
<p>Jon’s fingers wrestle with his until they’re slotted comfortably together, still held together in a vice grip. Gerry gives him a lopsided smile, the ease of the gesture looking extremely out of place with the obvious strain of holding the front door closed. “And it won’t. I promise you, I’m not going to let it.”</p>
<p>Martin hears Jon’s sudden exhale, sharp and wounded, before he processes what the words mean. “Gerry,” Jon says, voice low.</p>
<p>“Jon,” Gerry responds. “I know what I’m doing, I’ll be fine.”</p>
<p>“You’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to let you go back in there by yourself.”</p>
<p>“We’ve done this before, you know I’ll be alright.” Gerry presses harder against the door as the banging gets louder, eyes pleading as he tries to convince him. “I’m already dead, I’ll bounce back. <em>You won’t</em>. Martin needs you here, you have to go with him.”</p>
<p>At the sound of his name, Martin’s brain kicks back online. “Hold on,” he interrupts, “you’re <em>going back in there?</em>”</p>
<p>“It’s never been like this before,” Jon says, ignoring Martin’s interjection. “This is so much worse than anything else we’ve been through and you know it, just come with us.”</p>
<p>“I can’t just let this keep going, <em>something </em>has to give.”</p>
<p>“Shouldn’t that something be me?” Martin interrupts again, this time determined to keep hold of the argument. “This is my thing, my—my screwup, whatever. I can’t just ask you to go in there and take care of everything <em>for </em>me, not when it’s my fault. Not when I know about your mum. It feels like I would just be sending you right back.”</p>
<p>“It’s not your fault.” Gerry echoes his own words from earlier, this time with more emphasis. “Sometimes you just can’t fix it on your own; you’re not asking me to do anything, I’m <em>offering</em>. She can’t hurt me anymore, Martin, I let go of her. I needed help, to figure it out, but I did it. And I can help you. You did your part already, and you did it perfectly. Let me help you finish it, please.” His words are punctuated by a sound that sounds like splintering wood. “I don’t think we have much time,” he adds hastily, “so if you would.”</p>
<p>A punched-out sound comes from Jon’s throat and Martin looks over to see him white-knuckling the grip on his cane. His eyes are wet, but his voice is firm when he speaks. “If you don’t come back in one piece,” he warns, leaving the rest of the threat to go unsaid.</p>
<p>“I always come back, Jon. I promised you, once, and I meant it. I’ll always come back.”</p>
<p>It takes a moment, one that couldn’t be more than a second or two and yet seems to stretch on and on into eternity, but Jon finally relents. The sounds of an engine turning over can barely be heard over the rumbling from inside Martin’s home and he and Jon turn at the same time to see Sasha’s car rolling up to them from down the driveway. Jon tugs on his hand to lead him to the car and it’s all Martin can do to follow him.</p>
<p>Because Gerry was right. As much as Martin hated asking for help, sometimes you <em>can’t</em> fix it all on your own. Martin had tried, and maybe he hadn’t made a right mess of it, but it still wasn’t quite enough. He didn’t know <em>how </em>to fix it, was the problem. Not on his own. Even if Gerry had let him handle the rest, Martin isn’t sure he would have been able to do much of anything to end it. And maybe that could be okay. Maybe he didn’t have to know all the answers. Maybe he could ask for help and take that help when it was offered. Maybe it was easier that way.</p>
<p>Isn’t that what he’d wanted, in the first place? Hadn’t he been so desperate for them to believe him specifically because he was tired of doing everything alone? Because he was tired of being the person that always gave himself away to everyone else and just once, just this one time, he wanted to be able to ask for help? Wanted to be able to take it without feeling guilty, for once in his life? Wanted to have people who cared enough to stick around?</p>
<p>And Gerry was offering, <em>freely </em>offering. Without looking put upon or acting like it was some chore for him to do. He <em>wanted </em>to help Martin. He hardly knew him, and yet here he was. Begging Martin to let him help, because he didn’t want to see anything bad happen to him. Because he knew Martin was bad at asking for help and wouldn’t accept it otherwise.</p>
<p>Martin doesn’t want to do it alone anymore. So he won’t.</p>
<p>In the back of Sasha’s car, Jon taps an unsteady rhythm against the wood length of his cane, nail polish chipping as it comes into contact with the varnished surface again and again. He doesn’t stop looking at the road behind them the entire time they’re driving.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>who would've thought miss jane would be such a good symbolic vessel for religious trauma, am I right?</p>
<p>last chapter will be the epilogue!</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Epilogue</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>y’all thought I was gonna make u wait to see what happened, huh? nah, I’ve had this double upload planned all month. enjoy!</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>By all means, Jon should be completely over the moon. It’s been a few weeks since they’d left Martin’s old house behind for good and really, since then everything has been great.</p><p>A day or two after they’d fled in the middle of the night, they’d gone back so Martin could pack up a few things and properly leave it all behind. They’d stuck around long enough to make sure it was really over, and they haven’t been back since. Martin still thinks about it, sometimes, still feels a bit of lingering guilt over it all. It’s understandable, considering. But he is happier in his new flat closer to the city, he says, where he’s nearer to all his friends. Where he’s nearer to <em>Jon</em>, and when Martin had first brought up that his new building’s proximity to Jon’s own had been one of its biggest selling points, Jon had just about shot himself into the stratosphere.</p><p>Moments like that, they haven’t been few and far between. There’s been so many of them that Jon’s practically lost count at this point, though he still likes to try and keep track.</p><p>There was the day after the night they’d left, when Tim had made good on his promise for celebratory drinks. When all four of them were still a little rattled and worse for the wear, but they’d <em>made </em>it, and they were just so <em>relieved</em>. That they were together, that they’d gotten out relatively unscathed. Tim had thrown his arm around Martin’s shoulders and made him blush with the sincerity of his remarks on how glad he was that Martin was “part of the team now,” and Jon had been enamored with the way it made the freckles stand out on his tanned skin.</p><p>A few days after, when they went back for Martin’s things. When Martin had been scared and hesitant but had held his head high and walked back into his house anyway, stepping over splintered wood and dead worms and never, not once, letting go of Jon’s hand as he’d stuffed his belongings haphazardly into a large duffel bag and said goodbye for good. How he’d left most of his things behind, determined to start over with things that made him feel loved. How he’d decided that Jon, somehow, was one of those things.</p><p>Finally, after they’d had the chance to settle some, their first date. Their third date, Martin insists, but the first one that Jon had actually planned for. The first one that was deliberate, with Jon letting Martin up to his flat and cooking dinner and spinning him around the kitchen while soft music played from Jon’s tinny phone speakers and the food was left to simmer on the stovetop. When Martin had lingered at the doorway at the end of the night and Jon had barely restrained himself from inviting Martin to stay over too soon and Martin had kissed him, so softly like he was made of glass, and Jon had sighed longingly and let Martin tip his forehead against his own and Jon had just stood there for a few moments, holding onto Martin like the precious thing he was.</p><p>The first night that Jon <em>had </em>let himself invite Martin to stay over, perhaps still much too soon but neither of them were going to complain. Martin twitching nervously on the other side of the mattress, holding himself deadly still until Jon turned to face him, resting a hand on his cheek and squinting to make out his features in the dark of the room. Martin wrapping a hand over his and turning so, so slowly to meet him, like Jon would blow away into dust if he moved too quickly. The unspoken reassurances between them as Jon had shuffled forward under the blankets and tucked himself close against Martin’s chest. The way Martin’s breathing hitched and his arms trembled as he curled around him, tensing and untensing periodically until finally he’d let himself relax.</p><p>The night Martin had held his hands as Jon stuttered through an explanation of what asexuality meant for him, personally—namely that he didn’t want anything to do with sex at all, and he was sorry if it was a dealbreaker, but this was something he couldn’t compromise on. The way Martin had held him close afterwards, a kiss pressed against his temple, and promised him that it didn’t change anything at all. <em>You’re still Jon</em>, he’d said. <em>That’s all I want, really.</em></p><p>Every single time that Martin has woken up with that old, lingering fog in his head and it would be so easy for him to just stay in, to shut himself away and deal with it on his own, but he manages to get up and make himself a part of things anyway. Even when it’s only for a few hours, even when it’s only to sit in the afternoon sun at the park on his lunch break and exist with Jon in comfortable silence.</p><p>Even the rougher moments like that leave Jon with an ache in his chest so sweet that he can hardly believe his luck.</p><p>So he doesn’t mean to make it seem like he isn’t unbearably happy. He <em>is</em>, he loves Martin so much he can barely breathe with it and what the two of them have is so, so much more than he’d ever thought he’d get. But Martin wasn’t the only one who’d had to leave something behind for them to survive, and there were times when Jon couldn’t help but let himself slip into feeling a touch melancholy despite it all.</p><p>He should be there. Jon should be able to look over his shoulder in the afternoons and see Gerry digging through his things while he makes himself dinner, or come home after a date with Martin and be forced to endure his ridiculous teasing, or put up with Gerry’s exaggerated complaints that he’s being kicked out of his own home when Jon wants to spend time alone with Martin in his flat and tells Gerry to go haunt a Tesco’s or something for a few hours.</p><p>Gerry’s been through absolutely everything with Jon, kept him sane practically his whole life, and now he’s just <em>gone</em>. And Jon is just so goddamned happy, for once, and it <em>hurts</em>, because he can’t even tell his best friend about it.</p><p>It’s his fault, really. Jon had left him behind. And he knows he had to, he’s done it before even, but this was different. Sometimes, when a haunting gets particularly nasty, Gerry has to clean it up on his own. Jon’s never forced him to, makes it a point in fact to remind him that it should always be their very last consideration, and over the course of a few years they’ve only had to resort to that a handful of times. It does scare him, a little, but Gerry knows what he can handle and it usually isn’t so much of a problem regardless.</p><p>This one was different, though. Worse. Jon had known the minute he first set foot in Martin’s house that something was deeply <em>wrong</em>, even if he hadn’t wanted to admit it. This whole aftermath with Gerry disappearing had just solidified what he’d already known.</p><p>Before, when they’d had to do this, Gerry would always be back the next day, showing up on his couch on the third day at the latest. It’s closing in on a month now, and Gerry still hasn’t been back. Jon hardly knows what to do anymore. It’s getting harder to keep his hopes up.</p><p>Martin says something, his voice trailing upwards in the form of a question, and Jon suddenly remembers where he is.</p><p>It was meant to be a date. One Jon had planned when he was feeling marginally less sorry for himself, this kitschy little café that served all sorts of specialty teas that he’d thought Martin would enjoy. Jon looks at Martin, his head tilted in concern, and can’t help but think that he’s missed the mark of “enjoyment” by several kilometers.</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he sighs, “I just…” He trails off, removing his glasses and dragging a hand over his face. “Got stuck in my head for a second there, I suppose.”</p><p>Martin smiles a little sadly and reaches a hand across the table, palm up. Jon takes it without a moment’s hesitation. “I know,” Martin says. “It’s alright.”</p><p><em>It’s not alright</em>, Jon thinks, but he doesn’t snap. It’s not Martin’s fault, and Jon’s not going to let him think that he’s upset with him when the only person he’s really angry at is himself. Almost twenty years of having Jon’s back, and Jon can’t even get Gerry out of <em>one </em>haunting unscathed?</p><p>“It’s just,” Jon starts, pausing when his words get caught in his throat. “What if he’s…what if he’s still there, Martin? What if he’s stuck, somehow, and we just <em>left </em>him there?”</p><p>Martin squeezes at his hand. His voice is gentle when he answers. “He’s not stuck there Jon. We would have seen him when we went back to pack things up.”</p><p>Jon sighs. It’s a concern he’s expressed before and he knows, he <em>knows </em>Martin is right, but…what else is there? Jon can’t think of any other explanation for why Gerry has been gone for so long and it is <em>killing </em>him not having any sort of starting point. If he’d been stuck at the house, Jon would have known what to do next. Now he just feels useless.</p><p>“Sorry,” Jon apologizes, “I know we’ve been over this a million times by now, but…I’m just worried about him. He’s never been gone this long, and I can’t help but feel like it’s my fault.”</p><p>The hand curled around Jon’s twitches. “If it’s not my fault, then it’s not yours either,” Martin says. “It’s not fair to tell me not to blame myself and then go on and blame <em>your</em>self for doing no more than I did.”</p><p>Jon flinches. He hadn’t meant for it to sound like that. He scrambles for a moment, looking down at the tabletop in front of him and trying to figure out what to say next.</p><p>Martin tips his chin up with a knuckle, tilting his head upward so he’s looking at him again. There’s no anger in his eyes, Jon notes, just more gentle concern. “Hey,” he says, “I didn’t say that to make you feel bad. I just hate seeing you put everything on yourself when I know you would never put that same pressure on me. It’s equal, alright? You get to go easy on yourself, too. Okay?” He waits for Jon to nod before continuing. “And you’d both mentioned this time was worse, right? You probably just miscalculated. He just needs more time, is all. He’ll be back.”</p><p>Jon hums. It’s what he’s been telling himself, sure, but he doesn’t know if he quite believes it or not. He knows he wants to. Wanting and doing are two separate things, he’s afraid.</p><p>“Does it…does it feel like he’s gone?”</p><p>“I mean…no?” Jon considers it for a moment. He doesn’t feel any different than usual, except that there’s a cloud looming over his head that threatens to start pouring any time he lets himself be too optimistic. “I guess not,” he decides. “I don’t know how much of that is my own wishful thinking, though. I’m not sure I’d even know what it felt like if he was.”</p><p>“You’d know, I think,” Martin says, certain. “If he was gone. He’d tell you, somehow.”</p><p>He sounds so sure of himself that Jon considers letting himself be convinced. He tries testing it out. “You’re right,” he says. But his brow is still furrowed, his voice still wavers with uncertainty.</p><p>“He said he’d come back, Jon,” Martin reminds him. “All you can do is trust him.”</p><p><em>I’ll always come back</em>.</p><p>Gerry had made that promise once, back when Jon had barely come up past his knees and could hardly stand with how terribly his limbs were shaking as the spiders started coming up through the floorboards. Jon had been nearly out of his head, pleading with him between choked off sobs, still trying so hard to be quiet so he wouldn’t disturb his grandmother downstairs. He hadn’t known what was going on, what was going to happen. All he’d known was that Gerry made it go away and he didn’t want him to leave. He couldn’t let him leave, because then where did that leave Jon? He’d never had anyone else, how was he supposed to go back to doing it on his own?</p><p>But Gerry had bent down to his height, settled his hands on his shoulders, and looked him right in the eye. Spoke to him kindly, in no uncertain terms, like hardly anyone ever had. <em>I’m not leaving</em>, he’d said. <em>I’ll be back, I promise. I’ll always come back.</em></p><p>Jon had trusted him then because he’d had no other choice. Because Gerry had helped him when he needed it and he had no reason to believe that he wouldn’t keep doing the same thing.</p><p>Jon trusts him now, still, it’s just harder. He doesn’t have the simple, blind optimism of a child anymore, isn’t capable of taking things at face value. He wasn’t even good at it when he <em>was </em>a child, if he’s being honest, but it was at least easier then. Now he knows, on a much grander scale, exactly how many things can go wrong. Even if you don’t want them to. Even if you try so hard to make sure they don’t. Sometimes it’s just not up to you.</p><p>He clears his throat. “Um, Martin, do you—do you mind if—?”</p><p>But Martin is already pushing himself up to standing, grabbing for Jon’s cane where it hangs off the edge of the table and holding it out for him to take. Jon tries not to feel too much about how easily Martin understands.</p><p>“Thank you,” he says as he stands, little more than a whisper. “I’m sorry, I know this isn’t—”</p><p>“None of that,” Martin insists, although not unkindly. “You’ve helped me through my fair share of bad days, Jon. I get it.”</p><p><em>Right into the stratosphere</em>, Jon thinks, feeling the way his chest burns so brightly despite it all that he can’t believe he isn’t glowing with it.</p><p>Martin walks him home, hand laced in the one he has free. He follows him all the way to the elevator, resolutely keeping him company up until the bell dings and the doors slide open. He drops Jon’s hand as Jon moves to step into the lift, and Jon pauses.</p><p>Usually, Jon likes to be alone when he feels like this. Martin always waits, always checks to see if Jon will change his mind, but he usually never does. There’s no use bringing anyone else into it and it’s not like anything can be <em>done </em>about it, he just needs a minute on his own to build himself back up. Standing halfway inside the elevator, though, Jon finds that he doesn’t quite want to be alone. Not this time, at least.</p><p>He shuffles the rest of the way into the lift and holds out a hand so the doors won’t close. “Actually,” he says, “can you—? Would you mind coming up? It’s just…I don’t know if I can go up there, expecting to see him again, and have my flat be empty. Not again. And we did have a whole day planned, and I don’t want to—I mean, I know I won’t be good company right now anyway, so you don’t have to, but I’d—”</p><p>“Jon,” Martin cuts him off. “I’m not leaving you alone when you clearly don’t want to be. You’ve never done that to me, and I won’t either.”</p><p>It makes Jon smile, a bit, and he sees Martin soften at the slight curve of his lips. The knot in his chest loosens.</p><p>And then it tightens again, wound up messier and messier as the numbers in the elevator climb higher and higher. By the time they’re in front of his door, he feels like there’s a rather large weight sunken into his rib cage. He pictures it as a snake, slithering between the bones and tangling itself in all directions as it tries to figure out how to escape. Like he has so many times before, he closes his eyes and takes a deep breath and unlocks the door with shaking fingers.</p><p>And he pauses. His grip on the doorknob slackens and he almost turns away before Martin lays a steadying hand on his shoulder and he re-adjusts his fingers. Another deep breath, this one slower.</p><p>Just as Jon is about to finally turn the handle, he hears the familiar sound of thick-soled boots striding across the floor. His eyes fly open just as the door swings inward.</p><p>“Well it’s about time,” Gerry says. “I’ve been waiting up here since about midnight last night, don’t you know you’re supposed to leave a note when you’re going to be out late? Honestly, Jon, I raised you better than that.”</p><p>Jon feels like his joints have rusted over as he crosses the threshold, Martin just behind him, and lets the door fall shut. Martin shuffles up beside him, tangling their fingers together. It makes him feel a little less like his ligaments are about to snap and leave him in a pile of bones on the floor.</p><p><em>You’re not my mother</em>, he wants to joke. <em>I </em>am <em>older than you now</em>, he thinks. It’s all a whole lot of levity that he doesn’t feel at the moment, though, and instead all he can do is gasp.</p><p>“Gerry?”</p><p>Gerry looks like he crumples at the sound of Jon’s voice, unbothered façade dissolving as quickly as sugar in water. But he’s always been better at holding it together than Jon, and so he nods at Martin, looking pointedly at their joined hands, and says, “Were you with a boy all night, Jon?”</p><p>Jon barks out a laugh that sounds like it would rather be a sob. “You know I—”</p><p>“Yeah, yeah, not like that,” Gerry says. Despite the wetness around his eyes, he manages to look very unimpressed as he rolls them. “I know. You came out to me when you were sixteen. Twice.”</p><p>And something in Jon’s chest <em>pulls</em>. His leg buckles underneath him as he lets the cane in his right hand drop to the ground so he can launch himself at Gerry, throwing his arms around him and clutching tightly at the fabric of that stupid ratty tank top that he’s been wearing since Jon was nine. “You’re an idiot,” he says, voice muffled by Gerry’s shoulder.</p><p>“Well <em>I’m </em>not the one with a hero complex. If it weren’t for you deciding it was your job to save people from ghosts, I wouldn’t have to step in to save your ass all the time.”</p><p>“Only four times,” Jon corrects. “And the first time I was <em>nine</em>. That one wasn’t my fault.”</p><p>Gerry lets go so he can look Jon in the eyes. “This one wasn’t either. None of them were. Let me be responsible for my own choices, Jon, it’s rude to take credit for other people’s work.”</p><p>Before Jon can respond, there’s a noise from behind them and he turns to see Martin moving through the space, toeing off his shoes and moving to hang his jacket on a coat hook. He catches on to them noticing and flushes a little at being caught. “Sorry! I was trying to let you have your moment, you can pretend I’m not here. Or I can make some tea or something, if you want?”</p><p>Jon isn’t really in the habit of pretending Martin doesn’t exist. He hasn’t been since day one.</p><p>“That’s ridiculous, Martin.” He crosses the room to grab Martin by the hand and pull him over. “I’m not about to get in the habit of keeping the two most important people in my life separate.”</p><p>“Oh, so you <em>are</em> going to introduce me to your boyfriend,” Gerry says, sprawling himself over the couch. “I thought I was going to have to do that one myself.”</p><p>“You <em>have</em> met him before, Gerry,” Jon says, rolling his eyes. “Before you should have, I might add. Without telling me he could <em>see you</em>.” And sure, Jon had admittedly understood that Gerry had only thought he was keeping Jon safe by keeping his interactions with Martin a secret, but that didn’t mean that Jon didn’t still find it monumentally stupid. Gerry only ever hides things from Jon to protect him and Gerry is also an idiot. Both statements are facts that can and do coexist.</p><p>Gerry holds his hands out in front of him in a placating gesture. “First of all,” he says, “he wasn’t your boyfriend then. This is clearly very different.” Jon rolls his eyes but lets him continue. He’ll never admit this to Gerry, but this <em>is </em>one of the things Jon had been mourning while he was gone. The easy back and forth, the infuriating teasing, like Gerry was trying to fill the role of an older brother. All Jon had wanted, these past few weeks, all he’d been missing, was the excitement of sharing his happiness with his closest friend and all the stupid jokes that came with it. Now that he has exactly that, he doesn’t think he’ll ever find himself wanting for anything else. He plays the part of the long-suffering best friend well, but he revels in the digs at his expense more than he lets on.</p><p>“Second,” Gerry continues, “we’ve already been through this. Most people can’t see me. There wasn’t anything in that house <em>but</em> him, how was I supposed to know what he was up to? You know it was suspicious.” A troublesome sparkle takes up residence in Gerry’s eyes then, and his lips curl upwards in a teasing smirk as he continues. “Besides, I could tell he was your type. Jon, I love you, but your self-preservation instincts are for shit, if he <em>had </em>been a demon, you would’ve let him eat you alive without even waiting for him to ask first.”</p><p>Next to him, Martin looks very pleased with himself. “Really? Am I <em>exactly </em>your type Jon?”</p><p>Jon isn’t about to sit here and let his best friend and his boyfriend team up on him like this. He raises an eyebrow in Martin’s direction before directing a question at Gerry. “You know, he thought <em>we </em>were dating?”</p><p>Martin’s mouth falls open in exaggerated outrage. “Are you serious—Jon, no, I thought we were over this, you told me you wouldn’t—”</p><p>And Gerry sounds positively <em>delighted </em>when he responds. “Did you really? You know I’ve been twenty-six since he was nine. That’s <em>weird</em>.”</p><p>“You two are <em>very</em> close! And besides, you’re a <em>ghost</em>, I don’t know how any of this works.”</p><p>Jon can see the exact moment Gerry takes pity on him when he sobers up a little and flicks at Martin’s shoulder. “Look it is incredibly off-putting, but it’s a fair enough assumption on your part, especially when you don’t know the full story.” As quickly as he’d sobered up to spare Martin more embarrassment, Gerry brightens again, turning to Jon with a light in his eyes that he knows only means trouble. “You know what else is incredibly off-putting? Jon’s thirteen-year-old emo phase.”</p><p>Martin turns to look at Jon as well, delighted. “<em>You </em>had an emo phase?” He looks Jon up and down, taking in his muted green jumper and floor length grey skirt. “Really?”</p><p>“Well, look who I grew up with,” Jon tosses back, gesturing at where Gerry is reclined against his couch cushions. “Thought he was cool for some reason, sue me for trying to emulate it.”</p><p>“You just don’t want to admit you were in love with the lead singer of Fall Out Boy.”</p><p>Jon throws a pillow at him, declining to answer in favor of retrieving his cane from the floor and disappearing into the kitchen. “I’m not going to answer that,” he says aloud. “You two have fun embarrassing me though.”</p><p>As he busies himself boiling water at the counter, he can hear muffled whispers and barely concealed laughter filtering in from the other room. He smiles. Everything is exactly as it should be.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>*gives the archivist my fall out boy stan phase, as a treat* look I know gerry’s a goth and goth and emo aren’t the same but listen. jon doesn’t know the difference he just knew that gerry was cool and he wanted to kiss patrick stump.</p><p>jon is probably somewhere around 27 in this which means yes he could have logistically had a fall out boy stan phase at age 13 I checked my facts &lt;3 my facts being I am in my twenties and had a fall out boy stan phase as a teen</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>one last time: thanks so much to everyone for reading!! I really had a lot of fun writing this one bc it let me dip a little more into my horror writing skills and I always love to show those off. so it means a lot to me that u all had so much fun reading! y'all have no idea how giddy I was to wake up the morning after each upload and read all your wonderful comments</p><p>and bc it just bears repeating: thanks so much again to robin for always being there to bounce ideas off of and for just showing so much love and enthusiasm for everything I endeavor to do. nothing I write would be as good as it is if I didn't have her to talk everything through with, especially this bc when I was worried about the trickier aspects of this narrative she helped me shape it perfectly the way I wanted. so truly I love u so much thanks babe &lt;33</p><p>if anyone wants to keep up with more of my writing, u can head over to tumblr/twitter where u can find me @judesstfrancis and @acetheticallyy, respectively</p></blockquote></div></div>
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